


a vivid dream, a lucid scene

by babygrxxt



Category: Larry Stylinson - Fandom, One Direction
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Chaptered, Death, Fluff, I suppose, M/M, University AU, harry is a lovestruck idiot, little lovebugs, louis is an oblivious fool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-12 10:58:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2107275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babygrxxt/pseuds/babygrxxt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody has a talent. Zayn, he drew. Liam, he sang. Niall, he could drink for Ireland, and did frequently. Harry, he always knew exactly when, where and how people were going to die.</p><p> It’s no big thing, just like how his mum knows exactly how long it takes to bake her cakes and make them taste like heaven on a plate. His perception of the world wasn’t much different from the average person’s except for the beacons that hung over everybody’s head like an illuminated sign, only to be extinguished after the first glance. This meant Harry had no choice but to know that the little girl who said hello to him every morning was to die in a car crash two months from now, and that his university professor would commit suicide by gunshot in his late fifties following a divorce from his cheating wife. </p><p> He’s powerless to stop the hands of fate, and he knows that better than anything else, but when one boy in particular makes his way into Harry’s life obliterating everything in his way, Harry is determined to cheat death with him for just as long as he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

The room was filled with a sticky humidity that England usually lacked. Harry’s hair was melding into the slight sweatiness of his forehead, and the white shirt he was forced to wear during work hours was stifling against his neck. Zayn was standing mere centimetres away in the cramped proximity of the supplies cupboard, puffing away on a cigarette that was most definitely prohibited. His hair wasn’t spiked as it usually was; abandoned in favour of softness that seemed foreign against his chiselled features.

“It’s so fucking hot,” Zayn moaned, leaning his back against the wall. Harry mirrored his movements, unbuttoning the top of his dress shirt.

“Probably isn’t helped by that,” he murmured, pointing towards the cigarette. Zayn just raised an eyebrow in his direction and Harry slumped back, sighing. There was no point, and he was too warm and exhausted to care much anyways.

The closet was tight; so much so in fact that Harry and Zayn had to organise themselves to exit it, their shoulders too wide to stand beside each other. It had no windows, and smelt of damp and slight mildew, making Harry wonder, yet again, how the restaurant had managed to achieve a four star hygiene rating. The door jammed, forcing them to crash into it and each other to get out. However, despite all of its less-than-appealing qualities, Harry and Zayn spent more time in there during the course of their work week than they did out on the floor.

Gemma, Harry’s sister and the girlfriend of the establishment’s owner, poked her head in, dimpling away with messed up hair. “Jerry wants you out,” she said breathlessly. “A reservation’s came in., and I couldn’t get him to leave you for much longer.”

Harry shot his sibling a thankful smile and looked over at Zayn, who maintained his careful demeanour of uncaring as he puffed on the cigarette. “You take this one,” he whined, poking Harry in the arm after Gemma disappeared once again. “I need to finish my fag.”

“You know I hate that word,” Harry said, but he lifted his apron from the hook and tied it around the back expertly. He slicked back his hair, grimacing at the sweat that appeared on his hands.

Zayn rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he muttered. He threw a towel over to Harry. He wiped his hands on it and slung it around his waist. After dropping a notebook in the pocket of his apron and choosing a pen from the multitudes of biros hidden behind a large quantity of crisp packets Harry moved towards the exit, looking back at Zayn with fondness dripping off the edges of his mouth.

“Yeah, I know,” he said as Zayn leaned back into the wall, moulding so perfectly into the stone it was as if he’d been there his entire life. “It just brings back bad memories, yunno?”

The dark haired boy nodded and waved Harry off. “Thought you were meant to be working?” Zayn teased, smiling in the goofy and adorable way he usually did, and with that expression Harry made his way to the middle of the dining room.

He took a couple of orders with the typical Styles grin that always got tips flowing, but his mind was elsewhere.

Liam had been intending to come around for dinner at Harry and Zayn’s place that night. If he did decide to visit, would he bring Sophia? Harry still wasn’t sure what he thought of her yet. She seemed pretty and nice, but then again, didn’t every girl Liam brought home at the start? Harry and Niall would ultimately place bets after the first argument when the resulting break-up and heartbreak would occur, and Niall would always win because he was quite observant in that way.

Speaking of Niall, Harry hadn’t spoken to him for a couple days. This was a new record; they’d once gone seven months speaking three times a day. It might be because he was off visiting his family back in Mullingar and hadn’t had the chance to phone. Highly probable, considering how much his mother missed him. She was a nice lady. Harry liked her cakes.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened for the first hour of his shift. Harry watched, over the top of his notebook, the sun set over London, the light changing gradually from orange to black. He listened to the murmurings of the guests and bid goodbye to Gemma, argued with Zayn about work ethic and texted Liam, who was cooing about Sophia and how lucky he was to have her. It was when he was almost ready to go, the taste of freedom lingering on his plump, pink lips that he saw him sitting there, in the middle of the dining room.

He was at one of the most expensive tables; the one that was usually reserved for anniversaries or proposals. It was one of Harry’s favourites for this very reason; the people who sat there were always so polite, grinning with all of their face because of the happiness bestowed upon them. He hated it in a way as well, simply because it reminded him how painfully single he was. This boy, however, looked far too young to be getting engaged. He appeared to be around Harry’s age, and had feathery brown hair that was perfectly styled. He was wearing a tight suit that clung to his curves, dipping in just the right places. Harry couldn’t stop himself from going out of his way to pass by the boy, turning around to see his face.

His eyes were the feature that struck him the most. They were blue, like the colour of the sea against Spanish beaches, and they were surrounded by laugh lines which told Harry this boy was, in all definitions of the word, mischievous. Harry’s eyes drifted upwards to above the boy’s head, desperate not to see but knowing that he had no choice. This boy was to die in a year.

Everybody has a talent. Zayn, he drew. He crafted the most beautiful sculptures and images of everything you could imagine in their tiny studio apartment, cluttering up the meagre space they had with his various paints and clay creations. He created images of the London landscape, of the way the grass moved in springtime and how a mother looked down at her newborn’s hand wrapped around her finger. Zayn saw the world in a way that was different from most people; perhaps that was why he and Harry got along so well from the first time they laid eyes on each other. The continuing joke in the group was that he would never make money off of his talents, as his mother reiterated many times when he returned to Bradford. Despite this, the boy had remained determined, and was now studying Fine Art at London Metropolitan University.

Liam sang. His voice reverberated through the dingy pubs he performed in with nobody else but Josh on the drums and occasionally Niall on an old, fraying acoustic guitar. He had such an aura about him when he was making music, such a confidence on stage that didn’t come easily to just anybody. He was studying physiotherapy, having no interest in any other ‘worthwhile’ subject. Harry got the distinct impression from the boy’s drunken mutterings that he was only at King’s College because of his parents and his constant desire to make them proud in the way that his sisters had done. “After I’m finished here,” he slurred every Friday night without fail, “I’ll be on my way to the X Factor, just you wait and see!” Harry had no doubt that he would, and also had every confidence that he would become famous and die of alcohol poisoning at the age of sixty three, but that wasn’t for him to say.

Niall, he could drink for Ireland, and he did frequently. Apart from that, his other talents included making every situation into an acceptable brunt of his perverted jokes and chatting up each and every girl in the vicinity, provided they were drunk enough not to flick him off their shoulders straight away. He was studying engineering at the Metropolitan; smart underneath all of his dyed blonde, blue eyed wonder. He had many layers to him, most of the darker ones concealed by unending enthusiasm and rarely wavering optimism, and perhaps that was what made Harry find him so appealing as a best friend. They’d met in their first year in primary school over the sandpit, when Niall had asked Harry why he was wearing, as he put it, ‘a girl costume’. Young Harry was dressed in a Sleeping Beauty outfit whilst Niall was a Power Ranger, and never before had the young boy considered the fact that he preferred dresses to be a problem. He vocalised this to Niall in the crude way only a child could, and Niall had responded with an, “Ah, that makes sense” and a broad smile. They’d been friends ever since.

Harry was also studying at the Metropolitan; he was going for a law degree, aiming to be perhaps the only lawyer inherently distrustful of the government. He enjoyed crappy romantic comedies and indie artists that hadn’t been discovered yet. He went to music festivals every summer, much to the disappointment of his mother who considered them to be drug hotspots and places for bums to hang out, as depicted in early 90’s movies. He’d always known he was gay, and got his first boyfriend at the age of thirteen who also happened to be his first kiss, which occurred in the grubby dirt piles behind their high school canteen. It wasn’t romantic, but it stayed with Harry for years as the single most tummy-flipping experience of his young life. He also knew exactly when, where and how people were going to die.

It was no big thing, really. It was just like how his mother knew exactly how long it would take to bake her cakes and make them taste like heaven on a plate, or how Zayn knew where to move his pencil to perfectly capture the moment, or how Liam knew the notes of the piano by ear or how Niall got rejected every night at least once without fail. His perception of the world wasn’t all that different from a ‘normal’ person’s except for the beacons that hung over everybody’s head like an illuminated sign, only to be extinguished after the first glance. This meant Harry had no choice but to know that the little girl who said hello to him every morning back in Cheshire would die in a car crash two months from now, or that his university professor would commit suicide by gunshot in his late fifties following a divorce from his cheating wife.

Harry chose to look at this like a plus. For example, he had known that his father would die of cancer in his mid-thirties, making Des go to the hospital and get it checked out following much pleading and guilt trips. Styles Senior therefore managed to beat the horrific disease, and so Harry succeeded in saving his father’s life whilst reducing the length of his own. This was also no big thing – each time he tried to save someone he lost another six months.

He’d never told anybody about his ‘talent’, and he wasn’t really planning on ever doing so. It wasn’t that someone had explicitly told him that his abilities were a secret, at least not that he could remember. However, he had watched enough super-hero movies and supernatural TV shows to know that people with special things about them, things that made them unique from the masses, didn’t usually end up in the best shape.

That’s why it was a shame, really, about this boy. He seemed like he was nice, like he chuckled the day away and drunk throughout the nights. Harry could imagine he was the type to host parties in his hall, could almost see the image of the boy dancing around to ABBA holding a plastic cup filled with beer tightly in his small hands. Harry could also picture him coming up behind him with his own alcoholic beverage perched in between his fingers, resting his head upon the boy’s shoulders, having to slouch slightly to do so. He could almost hear himself whispering, “Great party” to which the boy, undoubtedly teasing and flirtatious, would respond, “Of course. I am the host”.

There was no trace of laughter on the boy’s face at that moment though. The expression that seemed most comfortable upon his features was abandoned in favour of a foot tapping against the carpet of the restaurant and slightly pink cheeks. His eyes drifted to the front door of the restaurant every now and again, getting more and more frequent in their glances as the night drew on. He was obviously waiting for someone, and that someone was obviously late.

Harry walked over to the table eventually, having spent the past ten minutes trying to work out what to say. He moved confidently towards the boy who was twiddling his thumbs against the whiteness of the table cloth, but the instant their eyes met his carefully rehearsed opening disappeared out of his mind, replaced with a slack jaw and wide, stupid eyes.

“Um,” he said, stuttering for only a second. The boy smiled slightly, but the gesture seemed forced. “Do you want anything? Any food or, or... a drink?”

“Nah,” the boy said, waving his hand slightly to emphasise his words. “My boyfriend will be here soon. It’s our second anniversary tonight.”

Harry felt a significant jolt in his stomach, but abandoned it in favour of looking worriedly at the boy. “When was your reservation for?” he asked, trying to sound kind and comforting. Unfortunately, some of his anxiety at the boyfriend’s absence must’ve leaked through, because the boy turned to look at him with a scathing look.

“Seven o’clock,” he snapped. Harry peered down at his wristwatch.

“It’s almost eight,” he said.

“No shit, genius.”

The boy didn’t mean it. He was just panicking; shitting himself in case he didn’t show and probably knowing that he wouldn’t.

“He’s usually this late,” the boy added. Harry suddenly found himself wanting to know his name, simply so that he could stop referring to him as ‘hot ass’ or ‘pretty eyes’ during his inner soliloquies about his beauty. “He’s usually even later! He arrived at his twentieth three hours after it started, no one thought he’d show up then, but he did.”

This boyfriend sounded like a massive jack-ass, but Harry thought it would be rude to point this out to a boy he had just met. He had other tables to tend, but it was only the late night stragglers so he considered them surplus to his working requirements. Besides, this boy with the gorgeous stubble and the lilts in his tone that sounded like he was from Doncaster was much more important than some snobby ass aristocrats who’d probably just look down on a server.

He lingered around the boy’s table, swaying slightly on his feet.

“You can go, you know,” the boy said, and then, seeing Harry’s stricken expression, “If you have other customers. I’ll be fine once Mark gets here.”

But whether Mark would get there or not was the question that ran through Harry’s mind over and over as he tended to the rest of the restaurant goers. He passed by the table two times after that, only to be waved away on each occasion with a fierce, “He’ll be here!”

The two couples (a particularly snotty pair and another who looked significantly like they had just banged in the bus shelter before they came in here) were halfway through their dinner. Harry’s shift had ended ten minutes ago, but he still stood watching from the back room as the boy shuffled around on his seat, having picked what he would order long ago.

Zayn noticed him paying particular attention to the boy and settled his hand on Harry’s arm. “You know him, mate?” he asked, squinting in his direction. Harry shook his head.  
“Not that I know of,” he answered, but it was a lie. True, he couldn’t recall an exact moment in which he had seen or spoken to this boy before, but he couldn’t help but feel that this boy looked exactly how forever would personified. “Just worried, you know? I think he’s been stood up.”

The dark-eyed boy paused for a moment before disappearing. When he returned, he held a relatively expensive bottle of wine in his slender fingers. “I’m sure Gemma won’t mind,” he said, pressing the alcohol into Harry’s grasp. The younger boy grinned at his friend and mumbled a thank you.

Blue-Eyes looked up at Harry, tears swimming in the endlessness of his irises. “I don’t think he’s coming,” he admitted, his voice warbling through his confession. Harry felt a deep ache settle within himself; a need to help this boy that overtook his actions and forced him to sit down.

“Nah,” he said gently. “I don’t think so either. But it’s good for you, because I’m off in ten.”

It was a lie, and Harry had never been particularly convinced that relationships based on untruths could ever result in anything great, but it would’ve been even creepier to admit that he’d stayed at the job he despised and put off eating dinner with one of his best friends just to check on a boy he’d only met that day.

“What’s your name?” Harry asked, pouring out the wine into the glasses that were originally reserved for the happy couple.

“Louis,” the boy mumbled, sipping on the red liquid. Harry pursed his lips and nodded, as if approving of the name.

“It suits you,” he said. Louis’ cheeks went slightly red, but it might’ve been because of the tears in his eyes.

“You know, I got stood up once.” Louis squinted at him, ceasing drinking. “Not that you’ve got stood up, of course,” Harry said hurriedly. “I’m sure he just got caught up on something.”

“He should’ve called,” Louis said with a note of finality that told Harry he was safe enough to continue.

“It was for a girlfriend I had when I was experimenting a bit,” he said. Smooth coming out there, Harry. “It didn’t end up working out, but at the time I was really trying, you know? I’d set up this whole dinner on this little island out the back of our houses, big four course dinner I cooked myself and all, with these little silver spoons and my mum’s fancy china. It was absolutely freezing, so I left little notes around her house saying for her to wrap up warm for our date that night, but when it came down to it and I was standing in a pool of rose petals holding a bouquet in my freezing, blood red hands she texted me saying it was too cold for her to come out and we’d just have to postpone whatever crap I’d been planning.” Even now, Harry winced at the memory. Louis did as well. “Her words,” Harry finished. “So you’re not alone in this.”

Louis looked at him for a moment, his eyes hopelessly bloodshot and sore looking. “You got stood up?” he asked, disbelieving. “But you’re...”

He stopped talking and began blushing profusely. Harry smirked at him and thought about teasing, but then remembered the boyfriend, which put him off enough to continue with a normal, pleasant conversation.

“Everybody has at some stage,” Harry said. “Are your eyes okay?”

The blue of his irises were even more striking amongst the red of the veins in his eyes. “Do you have a bathroom here?” he asked, and Harry nodded hurriedly. “Can you show me it?” Louis prompted when Harry remained sat down, staring at him.

Harry nodded and rushed to the bathroom, ignoring the knowing look from Zayn, who was lurking behind the bar. He chucked his apron to him as he held the door open for Louis. “Shut up,” he mouthed to the dark haired boy and continued after Louis, who was standing in front of the mirror holding his eyelids.

The younger boy watched with baited breath as Louis grabbed something – which he later registered to be a contact lens – out of his eye, and then the other one. “I can’t even fucking see because of him now,” Louis said, laughing through the tears that followed. “And I’m only crying because my eyes hurt.”

“Good,” Harry said. “He’s not worth it.”

“He’s my boyfriend,” Louis protested, placing the lenses into a piece of toilet paper and throwing them in the waste basket. “He wouldn’t have just stood me up. I hope nothing’s wrong.”

Harry considered trying to coerce Louis into dumping Mark via text (because goddamnit that was the most that asshole deserved) but the boy seemed hesitant to do anything to stand up for himself, even refusing to call his lover. “I don’t want to be clingy,” Louis said finally, making Harry wonder who had criticised him for that before. Sentences like that, insecurities such as what had been shown, didn’t come from just anywhere.

“Fine,” Harry conceded eventually. They were halfway through the bottle of wine now, and Louis was crunching on a packet of crisps Harry refused to share. “So. Louis. Tell me about yourself, other than the fact you have a boyfriend and you live in London.”

Louis paused, wiping his crumbly fingers on a white napkin. “Em... I don’t really know what to say. I’m just normal, I guess.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Harry refused, smiling at him over the table. “Come on. Just tell me anything. Do you go to school?”

“Yeah,” Louis said, looking more comfortable now that he had a distinct question to answer. “I’m studying English with Film Studies at King’s College.”

“Oh,” Harry said. “My friend Liam goes there. He’s studying...”

“Physiotherapy? Yeah, I know him. Liam Payne. Big guy, good looking?”

“That’s the one,” Harry grinned, holding back the stammer of jealousy that came up (which was ridiculous, this boy was in a relationship anyways). “Do you have a job?”

“I help out at the Kids Club at the hotel not far from here,” he said, offering Harry a crisp for about the thousandth time, which he refused. “I’m basically a glorified babysitter, but it pays the bills.”

He could imagine him playing with children, smiling along with them as they sorted out blocks by colour. He could see him smiling at them softly, see the characteristics someone would fall in love with appearing before his very eyes.

“That sounds like a fun job,” he said. “Better than here, anyways. It’s my sister’s boyfriend’s place, so if I screw up the whole family will know.”

Louis laughed, his eyes crinkling adorably. Harry shouldn’t have even been talking to him, not when he knew he’d die in a car crash (ouch) a year from now... Thirteen months later, just as everyone would be leaving school, there’d be a funeral with a woman who looked just like Louis crying over a coffin. Would Harry be there? Would he let himself fall for it, knowing what the ending would be?

“You could come in sometime, if you want,” Louis offered casually, as if he hadn’t given Harry the world. “The kids would love you, I can tell.”

“I’m not sure when I’m off work though,” he said, playing it cool, although he had the impression Louis knew how shaky he made him. “And I have to study. Law degree and all.”

Louis shot him a mock shocked expression. “You’re attractive and smart. If I was single, I might just have to take you home right now.”

“What’s stopping you?” Harry asked, twirling the last remainder of the red wine in the bottom of his glass. “Mark seems a bit...”

“Insensitive?” Louis said. Harry nodded, although it wasn’t what he was about to say. “Yeah, he comes across that way. He’s a good guy underneath it all.”

Harry disagreed. A good guy wouldn’t put tears in Louis’ eyes. A good guy would know the treasure he had sitting waiting for him in a fancy restaurant. A good guy wouldn’t have stood him up.

An exasperated groan escaped Louis’ lips. He leaned back against the seat, still holding onto his empty glass and packet of crisps. “I just... I love him, you know? It’s hard to leave someone you love.”

“How did you meet him?” Harry asked, somehow knowing that he wouldn’t get another word out of Louis unless it was to do with Mark.

He smiled stupidly at that. “I was a complete idiot in high school, like the biggest loser you could imagine. No, I was,” he interjected when Harry went to protest. “Mark was the hottest boy in the class, fuck, he has the most amazing eyes. And I had this insane crush on him since I was like fifteen up until last year when he asked me out. It was... incredible, because I didn’t even think he was gay, you know? But he liked me, and he asked me out when we were working on a science project, and we ended up...”

Louis stopped talking and coughed, his face going slightly red. Harry smirked in amusement. “You ended up?” he prompted.

“Idon’twanttotalkaboutit.”

“You had sex with him, didn’t you?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it!” Louis snapped with his cheeks burning. He grabbed his coat jacket from the back of the chair and shrugged it onto his shoulders defiantly. Harry was still smiling with only half his mouth when he stood up with him.

“You’re blushing,” he said, poking Louis’ cheek gently with his long finger. “It’s kind of adorable, really.”

“If I’m so adorable,” Louis said, moving to stand in the doorway of the restaurant. The blisteringly warm day had transformed into a cool, serene night with not a cloud in the sky. “Why haven’t you asked me for my number?”

“You’ve got a boyfriend, don’t you?” Harry responded, leaning up against the wall. Their faces were only a few inches apart, which should’ve been awkward at best, but it felt casual, normal, like they were always meant to be like this.

“I don’t need to be single to have friends,” Louis mumbled with a smile. He moved even closer to Harry. “Do you have a pen?”

Harry nodded, not wanting to leave the proximity to go and get it. “Zayn,” he called out, and then, when his co-worker didn’t respond, “ZAYN.”

“What, Harry, what?” Zayn asked, running out into the restaurant. Harry had the distinct impression he’d been listening in, because he already had a notepad and a biro in his hand. Louis smiled at him shyly and borrowed them with a polite thank you.

Harry watched as he wrote his number down in carefully messy font. “Call me sometime,” Louis said. “It gets boring out at King’s.”

“I can imagine it does,” Harry teased, taking the notebook back and ripping out the only page that mattered. “I’ll definitely call you.”

“Aren’t you going to walk him home?” Zayn muttered in his ear, so quietly that Louis raised an eyebrow in confusion. The dark-eyed boy winked at Harry and disappeared, leaving his friend to awkwardly grin at the beauty in front of him and say, “Do you want me to walk you home?”

“I’m guessing that’s what your mate said,” Louis laughed. “But it’s dark, and I can’t really see, so... Yeah. That would be nice.”

“Wouldn’t want you to get mugged or anything,” Harry said, picking his coat up from the hanger near the door, feeling significantly like there was a weight resting upon his chest, preventing any oxygen from entering his lungs. (He hoped Louis wouldn’t notice his staggered breathing. He was such an idiot.) “Where do you live?”

“Near King’s, actually,” Louis answered. “About five minutes from here. You?”

Harry found himself wishing that it was a longer way away, although that was a stupid thing to desire. “About five minutes away too,” he said. “We were a couple streets from each other and we didn’t even notice.”

“Good thing I met you, then,” Louis teased, pulling a pair of gloves out of his blazer pocket and putting them on. His breath was dancing on the wind, visible against the blackness of the sky. “I heard it’s wise to get in with the neighbours.”

“We’ll need to set up a distress call,” Harry suggested, waving his arms around frantically to demonstrate. “In case you’re being held to gunpoint like all those movies.”  
Louis laughed, putting his hand on Harry’s waist to calm him down. His fingers were warm, burning into his skin, making him feel significantly lighter than he had been. And then the sign appeared again, flashing pointedly against the night sky, counting down the hours.

“For some reason, I don’t think an assassin would allow me to wave my arms like that out the window. Might bring a bit of attention to it, you know?”

“I don’t think you’ll need to worry about it,” Harry said thickly.

“How do you know?” Louis asked, blowing on his own hands to warm them. “It’s not likely, but you never know what’s going to happen. We need to be prepared for anything.”

“I think,” Harry chuckled. “You’ll find that with me, I’m pretty prepared.”

“Ah,” Louis murmured. “You’re one of those perceptive types, right? Yeah, I pinned you for that the second I saw you.”

“Didn’t know you took notice of me,” Harry said, blushing slightly. He was thankful that it was cold so that he could blame it on the wind. “I thought you were too busy worrying about Mark.”

“Why do you always say his name like that?” Louis asked with crinkles beside his eyes. Harry raised an eyebrow, and so Louis elaborated. “ ** _Mark_** ,” he imitated in an extremely deep and raspy voice.

“I do not sound like that!” Harry protested loudly, the sound bouncing off the buildings surrounding him, causing a few pigeons to fly off into the clouds. Louis grinned.  
“Yeah, you do. But it’s okay. It’s kind of sexy.”

“You really have no boundaries, do you?” Harry said, half amused, half scandalised.

“Why should I have?” Louis asked, stopping to swing around a nearby lamppost that was flickering dangerously on a street corner. He looked freezing, with his perfectly quiffed, feathery hair and only a pair of gloves to heat him up, but wrapped in that tight suit he appeared in that moment to be an angel in disguise. “What fun are boundaries?”

“Mark might disagree,” Harry pointed out, swallowing thickly.

Louis shook his head. “Nah,” he said, taking another circuit around the lamp. “He’s cheated on me before a couple times. Not really a good moral compass on him, but it’s okay. I don’t mind. He chose me after all, didn’t he?”

Harry was about to disagree (or throw something, honestly, because how much of a dick cunt fucker bitch ass idiot was this boy dating?) when Louis stopped and pointed behind him. “This is me,” he said, a careful smile lingering on his lips.

“Would it be clingy if I phoned you tomorrow?” Harry asked, forcing himself to grin at the boy as he moved closer to him.

He nodded wisely. “Of course it would be, Harry. Wait at least three days after a date to call, you know that.”

“Ah,” Harry said. “But this isn’t a date. You said so yourself.”

Louis raised an eyebrow. “I did?”

“Yeah, the minute you mentioned Mark.”

“Well then,” Louis teased. “I guess you might as well call tomorrow. But don’t expect me to pick up. I have a lot to do you know...”

“So do I. Might not get a chance to phone until Wednesday...”

Blue-Eyes laughed, throwing his head back. “Well, how about we just meet on Wednesday then?” he suggested. “Highbury Fields? You know the park near the Metropolitan?”

“I have to wait a whole four days?” Harry exclaimed, taking a few paces forward so he was only prevented from being pressed up against Louis by that goddamn lamppost.

“Good things come to those who wait,” Louis said, placing a hand on Harry’s upper arm before he turned around and ran into his house, waving to him flirtatiously as he did.

Harry laughed and pretended to tilt his cap, and just like that, forever disappeared just as quickly as he had come.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, which was a Sunday, Harry called in reinforcements in the shape of Liam, Niall and Sophia to join him in discussing the pure _audacity_ of having to wait three days for a guy he hadn’t even kissed. They sat in a hap-hazard circle in the middle of his and Zayn’s living room, propped up with a multitude of pillows and blankets that the boys’ mothers had sent.

Niall was chomping on a ham and cheese sandwich and Liam and Sophia were sharing a glass of Sprite, but Harry couldn’t bring himself to eat anything with the butterflies assaulting his stomach. It was difficult in a juvenile way, perhaps, to decide whether or not to text Louis and stop this constant barrage of missing a boy he had only just met. Sophia was making the decision easier though, because she had taken his iPhone and was sitting on it at that exact moment. “Stay strong,” she had advised him, patting him on the shoulder. It was easier said than done.

This was the first time meeting Liam’s new girlfriend, and apart from having to witness their never-ending stream of kisses and ‘subtle’ touches, Harry knew that it meant he’d have to be aware of when this girl would die. Thankfully (for Liam, at least, and Sophia too he supposed) she’d die after him at seventy-three due to a heart attack; a relatively fast way to go, and painful for only a moment. It was better than the majority of deaths Harry had read about, anyways.

Niall finished off his lunch and tossed it to the side, not caring that the crumbs fell out all over the carpet. He would die at fifty-five. Prostate cancer. It wasn’t fair that Niall’s light should be extinguished so early on in life; he might not even have the chance to see his grandchildren. But, alas, Harry was selfish, and he had decided long ago that if he wasn’t Niall’s friend in forty years he’d leave it up to fate. (How else was he supposed to explain it anyways? He could hardly advise him to get checked for cancer in exactly thirty five years - it would undoubtedly lead to questions, and those were one thing Harry couldn’t bring himself to answer.)

“You know, I have the distinct feeling you want to bone this guy,” Niall said crudely, looking over at Harry from the other side of the room. Sophia glared at him for his bluntness, but Harry appreciated it.

In faint terms, yes, Harry did want to ‘bone’ Louis. He wanted to screw him until he forgot Mark’s name. But he also wanted to tuck him into bed when he was sick, and kiss his temple when there were thunderstorms, and wrap his arms around him when he was making breakfast.

Liam just laughed. “You’re real observant, Ni,” he teased, punching the blond boy in the arm playfully. “I think a flying horse could see Harry’s got it bad for Blue-Eyes.”

“I thought his name was Hot Ass?”Niall said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Or maybe I was confused by how many times Harry described it.”

His face must’ve been red at that, because Sophia became indignant and started scolding the boys. Niall seemed frankly amused by her actions, whereas Liam looked more berated.

“Leave poor Harry alone,” she barked. “I bet you that you’re not so cool when you’ve got a crush on someone!”

“On the contrary,” Niall said, licking the end of his finger. He proceeded to pick the crumbs off the carpet and eat them (Harry was too annoyed with him to advise against this). “I am the picture of sophistication.”

“What about last night?” Liam said, perked up once more. “You missed it, Harry, but it was amazing. Niall...”

“I’ll tell the story!” the Irish boy squealed excitedly. Liam, seemingly annoyed that Niall wasn’t crimson by now, settled back down beside Sophia, their legs tangled together amongst the cushions. “Okay, so imagine me, under flashing lights, the club pumping...”

“There were three people in the place, Harry, I’m not even joking...”

“I’ll tell the story Liam, if you don’t mind. Anyways, it was a rocking night, hotspot of London I think, and over the room I see this gorgeous, bleach blonde beauty...”

“Until you got up close on her, then she looked like a truck. And _that’s_ being kind.”

“Thanks Sophia, you saved me from having to hit him. So I went over to her, only one beer in me, and I slid up past her friends who were giggling away and I said, ‘They say not to judge a book by its cover, but I don’t even know you and I’m checking you out’. She was totally into it.”

“I think she’d had like ten shots, she was looking pretty woozy on it...”

“Regardless, I scored, and we went into the back of the bar to get our sexy time on...”

“Is that what you call it now? It looked more like you were trying to eat her alive.”

“And, despite what Liam might say, I am an amazing lover, so obviously she was all into it, and I was too, until I got her out of her dress.”

Harry found this the right time to pipe up. “If you say anything objectifying about women, Niall, I’ll be forced to kick you out of my house here and now.”

“He can’t say anything about women, Harry,” Liam burst in before Niall had the chance. “Because the girl was a man!”

All thoughts of Louis went out of his mind for a millisecond as he stared, open mouthed and holding back laughter. “You didn’t,” Harry breathed.

“He did!” Liam screamed with delight, so loudly that it must’ve woken the neighbours. “And you didn’t even hear the best part. Go on, tell him the best part.”

Niall was looking infuriated at Liam’s entertainment at his expense and refused to speak. He picked up his plate and ran into the kitchen, the sounds of it crashing into the sink echoing through the flat.

“He didn’t even end it there,” Liam laughed. “The poor girl came out to me and said she didn’t think she was what he’d expected and for me to bring him home. I had to go and get him to apologise to her. She was nice enough. I don’t know why she’d go for Niall.”

Harry shook his head in disbelief. “I cannot believe him,” he said. “But at least she’s got some class, dumping Niall.”

“I swear he’d have sex with a turtle.”

An indignant cry came from the kitchen, followed by a long line of profanities. “I heard that, you...”

Sophia made a point of putting her hands over Liam’s ears to ‘protect his innocence’. “Now that _that’s_ over,” she said pointedly. “We can get back to Harry’s problem, which is the reason we’re all here, after all.”

Niall reappeared after a few moments, red-faced and sheepish, and sat down as far away from Liam as he could. Initially he didn’t speak, and when Liam went to bring up the subject again Sophia gave him a look, so all of the focus was on Harry’s love-life (or lack thereof).

“You’re going on Wednesday though, right” Sophia said, more of a statement than a question. Liam’s fingers were tracing her hand subconsciously and without meaning; it was as if it was comforting to him simply to know that she was there, right beside him, all skin and bone and love.

“Of course I am,” Harry said, feeling that such a question need not have been asked. “But should I text him before? I mean, he gave me his number. That must mean something.”  
“What would you even say?” Niall asked thickly, still looking irritated.

“Well,” Harry began, scrunching his nose. “I was thinking of complimenting him. Like, say something nice, like you’re really funny...”

“I want to suck your dick...”

“Things like that,” the green eyed boy finished, purposefully ignoring Niall. Sophia pursed her lips together, nodding.

“Well, that would be one way of doing it,” she conceded. “But, you’re ignoring the obvious problem: the boyfriend.”

This launched the group into a debate more passionate than the majority of politicians, describing their morals and ethics in more detail than they ever had before through a bevy of suggestions at Harry’s expense.

Sophia: Well, you can’t break them up, obviously. That would just be wrong.

Niall: Even though Harry knows he’s better for Hot Ass than his fuck-bucket of a boyfriend?

Sophia: Even so, Niall, really. Do you have _any_ moral compass, or do they fail to give them out in Ireland?

Liam: That’s not fair, babe. Don’t blame Ireland for Niall’s idiocy.

Harry: I’m not planning on breaking them up. I don’t think I could look at him knowing what I’d done.

Niall: You could look at him naked alright though. All I’m saying is, if you really want to screw this guy, the first protocol is to seduce him with those big green eyes and adorable curls.

Harry: He did say my voice was sexy.

Sophia: Maybe he was just being polite...

Liam: Please. I don’t look down at your hiney and say, ‘Oh, look at that, what a sexy ass’ if I’m not thinking of grabbing it within the next five minutes.

Sophia: Liam.

Niall: Look what you’ve done now, Harry. You’ve broken up yet another couple.

Harry: I’m not going to break Louis and Mark up, Niall.

Liam: Louis? Louis Tomlinson?

Harry: I don’t know his second name. He says he knows you though.

Liam: Fuck’s sake, Harry, you didn’t tell me you’d fallen for _Mark’s_ boyfriend.

Harry: I’m pretty sure that’s all we’ve been talking about, or am I missing something?

Niall: You always seem to.

Sophia: That’s mean, Niall.

Liam: Mark Rodrickson is massive, Harry. Like, six foot tall...

Harry: I’m five foot eleven.

Liam: Muscle-head, goes to the gym five times a week...

Harry: I’ve been there once or twice.

Liam: He’s got tattoos all over his body, pretty sure even on his you-know-what...

Harry: I have tattoos.

Niall: How do you know what’s on his you-know-what?

Sophia: I think what Liam’s saying, Harry, is that in a stupid and egotistical way, Mark is the ultimate catch. Maybe you’d be better leaving this boy alone...

Harry: He made Louis cry!

Niall: Why the fuck do you care?

Harry: I don’t.

Sophia/Liam/Niall: Then leave. Louis. Alone.

*

To say that Harry was slightly irritated with his friends would be an understatement. He knew that he had asked them for their help and that is what they had provided; it was just that he found it extremely difficult to accept it when it didn’t coincide with _his_ feelings.

For example, when he had a crush on a kid from football practice and had asked Niall about it a few years back, it was very easy to follow the blond boy’s advice to go and ask him out, simply because that was what he had been planning to do anyways. Now that his friends were so vehemently against the idea of him dating Louis, he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do.

Butterflies, anger, frustration, irritation - Harry felt everything and more during the days in which Louis was nowhere to be found. The contours of his face were already blurring in his memory, but the one thing that stood out so plainly was his illuminated sign, taunting Harry in his dreams, or rather his nightmares.

Perhaps his friends disagreeing with his vision of a future between them was a sign, an opportunity for Harry to listen to them and his gift and to back the hell away before he got hurt. However, despite thinking this again and again over the hours, Harry still came back to an argument for the relationship that was just as convincing; the fact that it was Louis.

If this was a movie, or a book, there was a plot device known as _deus ex machina_ which would’ve come in handy. It meant that something happened just in the nick of time to help a character overcome a difficult and otherwise impossible to achieve obstacle, such as the tantalising closeness of Harry’s phone. He didn’t know what he was expecting, really. A sign from the universe, for Louis to call first (but how could he, Harry hadn’t given him his number. Stupid, Styles, stupid), something. Anything.

He would’ve been perfectly happy to spend the time he had moaning around him and Zayn’s apartment, but unfortunately work and law school called him to action and he was forced to attend classes and shifts that he didn’t really give a shit about. It was an endless tirade of normalcy, something that Harry often craved because it assured him that his gift made him no different than the next person, but now it seemed constricting, formally suffocating, mundane and expected. The moment that Louis Tomlinson (his full name rolled off Harry’s lips and sprawled outwards, filling the room with thoughts of him) came into his life with a tight suit and nervous twitches was the moment Harry lost motivation to accomplish anything other than his affections.

It was Tuesday afternoon and he was studying in Highbury Fields, the park in which he would meet the boy the following day. He loved Zayn, he really did, it was just that sometimes they had – how to say this – differences in opinion. Zayn was contemplative, deep and hopelessly messy. Harry was much the same. Together, the apartment was a mismatch of interests, unclean carpets and ratty sofas. Sometimes, the dank stench of their flat made them quite irritated with each other, resulting in arguments and Harry being unceremoniously thrown out to study elsewhere. It was embarrassing, really.

The sight of his own illuminated sign reflected back in the shiny surface of a nearby parked car, ticking down the forty years until his demise. It had been forty years, seven months before he saved his father’s life, and he was to die of fluid build up in his lungs, but now it was forty years, one month of ‘self inflicted injuries’. He had gotten the message, loud and clear, and he was determined not to lose any more time. Despite how much he protested with Niall on drunken nights after break-ups, Harry really liked life. He wanted to keep at it.

“Well I’ll be damned.”

A loud, scandalised voice came from mere metres behind Harry. It wasn’t particularly familiar, like Niall’s or his own mother’s, but it was the sound that he had been replaying over and over again in his head for days now. He turned around to take in the sight of Louis Tomlinson, famed for his beauty, walking towards him over the bumpy ground.

There was a wide, toothy smile on his face, and his eyes were still red despite wearing glasses. Harry thought that he suited them. The frames made the blue of his irises pop even more against the tan of his skin. He looked different than he had that first night, because he was wearing a pair of blue shorts and a pastel button up shirt instead of a suit. He looked even more gorgeous casual, Harry thought.

“You just couldn’t stay away, could you?” Louis teased. Harry grinned at him and patted the ground beside him. Louis settled down amongst his scattered school books and the pages which were drifting cautiously in the slight breeze. He wasn’t clean-shaven anymore; there was a thin layer of stubble covering his cheeks. It suited him. (Everything did.)

“I was thinking of calling you,” Harry said, deciding to be honest. Louis’ eyebrow raised a fraction. “But then I decided against it.”

“You should’ve called!” Louis exclaimed.

Of course he would say that. He could hardly tell Harry that he was glad of the lack of communication because it allowed him more quality time with his douche-bag boyfriend.

“I’ve been _astoundingly_ bored these past few days,” the feather-haired boy announced, lying back against the grass. Harry remained sitting, cross-legged, admiring Louis from above. The sun was hitting him in just the right places, creating shadows on his face, emphasising all of his delectable features. He kind of wanted to kiss him all over, to be honest; to not have a place on this boy’s body where his lips hadn’t touched. It seemed such a waste to just be friends.

“Why’s that?” Harry asked, flicking a fly that had landed on Louis’ nose. Louis chuckled lowly and rested his arms against his own stomach.

“Well, there’s been nobody really to talk to,” he said. “Nobody apart from Eleanor, and she’s just El, so she doesn’t count.”

A bubble of hope crept into Harry’s stomach, pushing him to ask about Mark, but he refused, playing it cool. “What’s wrong with Eleanor?” he asked, being careful to sound only mildly interested. It just wouldn’t do to admit to this boy that he desired to hear him talk every second of his life.

“Nothing,” Louis responded simply. “It’s just that she’s been here for years, you know? She’s my roommate. We’re basically siblings.”

“Sounds like me and Niall,” Harry said, thinking that every moment he wasted making small talk could be spent kissing a newly single Louis (if that was the cause of his loneliness at all). “We met back in P1. He’s just tagged on with me the past fifteen years. Like a pet.”

Now, Harry can’t emphasise this enough: every single time, without fail, Louis laughed, someone fell in love. It just so happened that this time it was Harry.

“Mark went home for a while,” he explained, squinting in the sun. The aforementioned bubble of hope in Harry’s stomach died with a fatal pop. “He lives out in the country, so no phone service. I could’ve called a landline, but I have a hatred of landlines.”

“That’s not weird at all,” Harry said, smiling.

“Quirky,” Louis corrected. “And quirkiness is the spice of life, Hazza.”

“Did you just call me Hazza?”

“Would you prefer pumpkin?”

‘I would prefer you to call me tonight’ should’ve been his response. It was just teasing enough to not be taken seriously, yet it was flirty enough to be considered a proposition. Instead, Harry just grinned manically at the boy below him, who seemed happy that he was getting such a response.

“H?”

Harry shook his head.

“My sister calls me H,” he said, pursing his lips. “I wouldn’t want to be reminded of my sister every time I looked at you.”

“Yeah, that would be weird, right enough,” Louis laughed, probably not understanding Harry’s meaning. “What about... Bambi?”

Harry let out a loud, spontaneous laugh. Several people turned around to look at him, scrunching their eyebrows together in disdain, but for the first time in his life he didn’t care about their disapproving glares. “Bambi?” he repeated, spluttering slightly.

Louis shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’re all doe-eyed and innocent.”

“So a couple nights ago I was sexy, and now I’m innocent?” Harry teased.

“Maybe I’ll just call you Sexy. Sexy Styles,” he muttered, repeating the nickname a few times to test it out. Harry watched with the corners of his mouth tugging upwards as his lips formed around the words used to describe him before shaking his head.

“No?” Louis said. He was smirking now, and was insanely attractive as he did so. “How about Romeo? Hot Lips? Tight Ass?”

“Are you actually joking right now?” Harry said, but his voice came out tight and thin, like he was out of breath. Now, he was speaking so quietly that he doubted the people surrounding them would even hear it amongst the wind.

Maybe Louis realised that he had crossed a line, or perhaps he had remembered that he had a boyfriend and shouldn’t be turning some random guy on in the middle of the park, because he went back to talking normally after that.

“Baby?”

“Come to my house,” Harry spat out, not able to contain himself any longer. Louis raised an eyebrow and laughed, slight dimples appearing in his cheeks that he’d never noticed before.

“I’m guessing baby is the one for you then,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows so that he was closer to eye level with Harry. “Considering your response.”

“That wasn’t why I asked,” Harry said, trying desperately to ignore the heat that was rising up through his chest, the embarrassment that filled every crevice inside of him. “You said you were lonely, right? So, you could come around for a while, we could watch movies. My roommate would be there too, you know...”

“The dark haired, smouldering waiter?” Louis asked, his lips twisting upwards. Harry nodded.

“That’s the one. So it wouldn’t be like a... like a date or anything. Just two bros, two manly man pals...”

“Two no-homo homosexuals chilling out...”

“And it would be fun,” Harry finished, finally, inhaling sharply. It was hard enough to breathe around Louis without embarrassment adding itself into the mix as well. “What do you say?”

Louis pretended to think for a moment, or perhaps he was realising that he did in fact have boundaries, but then he said, “Do I get to pick the movie?”

“Anything you want,” Harry said and then, after a brief moment of consideration, “Except for porn” because he knew that Louis knew that he was so far gone for him already, and this was only the fifth day. Louis feigned annoyance.

“Fine,” he conceded. “Do you have DVDs at your house?”

“Zayn has an extensive collection of early 1990’s romantic comedies, and I have good movies,” Harry answered, smiling.

“Well, how can I resist that sales pitch?” Louis asked. “Besides, friends sleep over at each other’s houses all the time, right? It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Harry reiterated, but he noticed that was different to saying that it wouldn’t.

Louis paused, ran his tongue along his lips, and then pushed himself off of the ground completely. The swiftness with which he did so left Harry thinking about the strength of his legs, which led to him imagining them wrapped around his torso, pulling him down closer until their lips met in a fierce, honest-to-God-I-love-you kiss, which would deepen with each passing moment until they were as close as any two humans could ever be...

And Harry would want more, he knew he would; he’d want Louis to be in every cell of his body, to touch him in places nobody had felt the need to touch before, and he’d want to do the same with him, because goddamnit he loved this boy. He’d never felt so sure, so quickly of something before, but now that it was here, staring him straight on in the face and the feeling of urgency at the time-span of a year was looming in the back of his mind, he loved him.

With the same deflating feeling as the conversational topic of Mark had brought about, Harry thought that maybe that was why he was so insanely attracted to Louis; this was perhaps the last chance in which to be so. He was kidding himself into believing this kid was special, that he was something more than the next university student with an idiot partner.

They could just be friends, and they would just be friends, and maybe when the time came Harry would be able to prevent Louis getting into that car, provided he would listen to a seemingly paranoid nineteen year old. Because that’s what friends did for each other, right? They gave up their own lives to lengthen the others.

That didn’t sound right, for some reason.

“Have you ever heard the song,” Louis began, snapping Harry out of his thoughts. He was basically skipping along the path, throwing casual smiles at passersby. “That goes ‘I don’t want to be your friend, I want to kiss your neck’?”

Harry’s breath hitched in his chest. He couldn’t walk anymore, not when Louis was talking about kissing necks. It was so vivid a picture in his head that it was unbelievable to think it had never happened.

Dimmed lights in his apartment, flickering pictures on the television highlighting Louis’ cheekbones, the colours reflected in his irises. He would fit so perfectly into his side, curvy into straight, and he’d pull him close and lick along his neck, bite into his chest-bones, leaving the smell of Louis on Harry’s skin...

“Yeah,” Harry mumbled, slowing down so that they were inching along the pavement towards his flat. “Yeah, it’s by the 1975.”

“That’s it. Thanks.” Louis shot him a smirking grin before turning around. He walked a few paces in front of Harry and moved more quickly than a boy with his size of legs should’ve been able to, leaving Harry following thoroughly confused and convinced that Louis loved nothing more than messing with him.

“Oh,” Louis said suddenly, like an afterthought. “And if, by any chance, you happen to meet Mark and he asks, you’re straight as a pole, got it?”

Harry thought back to all the years he’d been too scared to say who he really was, all the months in which he dreamed of just being himself. But now, standing beside what a boy who made flowers grow with his smile, he just nodded.

“Got it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much to everyone who left kudos or commented! Your support just makes me even more motivated to write, and actually broke me out of some writer's block I'd been experiencing for a while. Hopefully the next chapter will come in a couple of days! :) Thank you so much for your support, it means so much xx  
> \- L


	3. Chapter 3

Despite Harry’s reassurances that Zayn would be accompanying them on their movie night, when they returned to the apartment the dark haired boy had seemingly disappeared. He left only a note that detailed the time he would be back (10.30pm) and his signature. Harry looked at the page, which was stuck to the fridge, pondering over the inconsistency in his normal behaviour – Zayn didn’t usually go out that late.

“I guess we’ll be alone for a while,” Harry said, thinking that whatever God existed must’ve specifically twisted the confines of habit in order for him to have three, uninterrupted hours alone with this boy. _Alone_. “Is that okay?”

“Sure.” Louis’ response came somewhat hesitantly, but Harry was too excited about the prospect that he barely noticed. “What are we gonna watch?”

“I told you,” he responded, leaning down to pull out a drawer of DVDs from the TV chest. “You can choose.”

Louis looked at Harry for a moment and then began sorting through the discs. “You’ve got good taste in movies, young Harold,” Louis said, smiling. “Is that what your full name is? Harold?”

“Nah,” Harry said, “Just plain old Harry.”

“What’s your full name though?” Louis asked, reading the back of a particularly cheesy romantic comedy. “I’ll tell you mine. Louis William Tomlinson. I’m twenty one years old, and my birthday is Christmas Eve. I’m from Doncaster. Now you.”

“Okay,” Harry smirked. “Harry Edward Styles from Holmes Chapel, Cheshire. I’m nineteen. My birthday is the first of February.”

“Harry Edward Styles,” Louis repeated, shaking his head at the fifth movie he had perused. “You’re from money, I’m assuming?”

“What kind of question is that?” Harry asked, slightly amused.

“A simple one,” Louis shrugged (Harry wondered if anything could ever really faze him). “For example, I’ve been broke my entire life and I’m broke now. No shame in it. But you’ve probably been spending your time in a fancy ass grammar school being taught the correct use of various verbs...”

A loud laugh escaped Harry. “What’s wrong with grammar schools?” he asked, settling into the sofa. His eyes followed Louis as he crawled around the floor searching for a movie, apparently a decision that required much deliberation.

“Nothing, nothing,” Louis muttered. “Just saying that you’re probably way better off than me, that’s all.”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” Harry said, and he was speaking the truth. He generally considered himself to be relatively open-minded and politically correct having spent years reminding himself of the right way of things after spending time around toxic company. Money, however, was never one of the issues he had considered. Perhaps that was one of the benefits of having enough; he’d never had to think of it.

Louis pursed his lips but didn’t speak another word of it. Harry continued to ponder over him - the tightness of his shorts around his arse, the tan expanse of his thighs, the way that driving with him would ultimately end in Harry with one hand on the steering wheel and the other gripping tightly to the skin peeking out from underneath those goddamn shorts. They’d pull up to a stop light and the red of the bulb would stay constant on the side of Louis’ face, which would be smirking, pulling him in closer by the neck of his shirt until their lips met in that first, hotly anticipated kiss...

He hoped, despite the increasing warmth of his face, it wasn’t entirely obvious what he’d been thinking of.

“This one,” Louis announced triumphantly, thrusting The Holiday up in the air. It was one of Harry’s favourites, partly because of the tummy flipping feeling it induced and almost entirely because of Jude Law.

“Good choice, grasshopper,” Harry teased. “You have learnt well,” as if there was nothing else you could watch with a boy you had just met while your boyfriend was miles away from the city.

Louis bounced up from the ground with the same irresistible swiftness, dropping like a stone into the seat beside Harry, mere centimetres away from his outstretched fingers. Most people in that situation would’ve spent the next few minutes apologising profusely for an action they hadn’t even committed, but Louis was different. He just skimmed over it, smiling away with crinkled eyes, amazingly divine.

“Do you have any popcorn?” he asked, looking up into Harry’s eyes as if it was the most important question he had ever asked anybody before. Usually, the answer to this question would’ve been a resounding ‘yes’.

Harry and Zayn were given £50 a week by their mothers to buy food and other necessities to keep them alive, but unfortunately the majority of the funds went towards stupid things, like comic books (Zayn) or vinyl records (Harry). Other times, when they went to those large stores that stocked in bulk, £20 went towards a bag of popcorn that very nearly towered over Harry’s own head.

It wasn’t their finest hour. Sadly, it wasn’t their worst either.

They’d trudged out of the superstore, clasping on desperately to the poorly designed packaging. They’d hoisted it up onto their shoulders about halfway to the car, which worked for the rest of the journey. Then came the deliberation on how to fit it into their small, crappy vehicle, which lasted about thirteen minutes before a worker came trudging out behind them with several ropes draped around her outstretched arms. “It’s happened before,” she said, sounding significantly exhausted with the entire situation. “Just bring the ropes back, k?”

Harry had promised that they would whilst Zayn worked on lifting the bag of popcorn up onto the roof and taping it on securely. Despite Harry’s unending trust in his friend, he really didn’t believe much in the stability of the popcorn’s bonds, and so he drove at a solid fifteen miles an hour the entire half hour trip home.

Niall had been particularly thrilled. Contrary to popular belief, Niall was not the type to fritter away money without regard. He had, during his time in university, developed a love for couponing. He spent the next six months - which was how long the popcorn bag lasted amongst four people - gushing over how smart a purchase it must’ve been and begging them to tell him where they had bought it (he didn’t believe Zayn when the dark-haired boy repeatedly insisted they hadn’t paid attention to the name).

Instead of explaining all of this to Louis, who he could barely get a word out edgewise with anyways due to the lack of oxygen in his lungs, he just shook his head.

“You invite a boy round to your house to watch a movie without _popcorn_ ,” Louis gasped, flinging his head back against the sofa and grasping onto his chest desperately, as if Harry had delivered heartbreaking news (which he might’ve, admittedly). “Well, we either go out and buy some – enough for Brown-Eyes too, of course – or I leave.”

There was no other option than to pile into the car (Harry desperately trying to ignore the tingling in the tips of his fingers) and drive to the nearby Tesco corner store, the type of shop that didn’t sell anything of use besides tinned foods and milk. Louis immediately ran to the front, the section beside the till, undoubtedly confident in his placement of the sweets.

Most people who go shopping for popcorn with only a couple of coins in their back pocket and no forward planning whatsoever probably would’ve stopped at two bags. Not Louis.

He forced Harry to the front of the store - being all assertive and downright sexy that Harry had no choice but to obey – and got him to grab a basket which he filled with various food substances; custard, chocolate cake, Onion Ring crisps, Skips, rice pudding, a microwaveable pizza, Bourbon creams and four packets of popcorn.

“I hope you’re not going to ask me to pay for all of this,” Harry mumbled as Louis raked his eyes over the remainder of the aisles he hadn’t already pillaged. “I’m a starving student, you know...”

“Shut up, Harry,” Louis teased, not looking up. “Obviously I’ll help. I’m just taking care of my ‘starving’ right now.”

A little sound of triumph passed Louis’ thin lips. He threw two packets of strawberry laces in amongst the other food substances and then nodded at Harry, smiling. “That’s me,” he declared, flicking a stray piece of hair out of his eyes. Harry just looked at him, slightly amused and unduly captivated, feeling nothing like the strong man his mother had raised.  
He was destroying everything, this boy.

“Can we go pay now, your majesty?” Harry asked, doing a little curtsey in the middle of the aisle. A little, greying woman smiled at the boys’ interactions amongst pondering over brands of milk. (He wondered briefly if from an outsider’s perspective that they were together; if she thought they were in love.)

Louis chuckled. “I think I’ve got more than enough. Mark called me fat the other day, so I might as well eat whatever the hell I want, right?”

“He called you fat?” Harry repeated, not able to mask the indignant tone to his voice. The old woman raised an eyebrow and scurried into another aisle. Louis let out a long, exasperated exhale.

“Yeah, well, I’m curvy, innit?” Louis said, beginning to shovel sweets into a Pick ‘n’ Mix bag with each word. “He just prefers stick thin model types... Like Alexa Chung or Cara Dele-whatshername.”

How could one person be so blind not to realise what was right in front of him? Louis was all bones and love, insane, unrelenting want. He carried himself so confidently that Harry should’ve felt insignificant beside him, but he didn’t. Louis was a radiator; he burst charisma from his every crack and crevice. It infiltrated anyone deemed worthy enough to stand beside him.

Louis was heart-breaking in the way that any gorgeous human being was. He was as painful as the sun to look at, but just as beautiful.

“For your information,” Harry muttered as he placed the basket beside the cashier, who cast it a questioning look that Louis pretended to ignore. “I prefer curvy.”

“I don’t see why that would matter,” Louis responded, not meanly, but somewhere in that zone. “I have a boyfriend, Harry.”

“I know.”

God, did he know about boyfriends and girlfriends. He saw them walking around; couples with their fingers entwined and their gazes love-struck and soppy. He tried not to despise them as their deaths lingered above their heads. One couple in particular around his street would die at the same time, the same moment, the same day in a plane crash. They would never have to deal with the pain of living without the other. Another, older, pair would die months within each other, warm and content in their beds.

Each time Harry thought of them, and of their lifespan, he thought of his own, and how the gift he possessed was far too much to place in one person’s hands. He wished that he could pluck up the courage to talk to someone about it, to see if it was perhaps, not a normal thing, but a phenomenon shared by others... Others just like him.

Sometimes he worried it would make him lose his humanity. Other times, in the darker nights in which he was hopelessly alone and Zayn was annoyed with him, he believed that it already had.

“That will be £27.89,”the bored looking man chimed, breaking him out of his thoughts. Louis beside him was busy searching his pockets, obviously to very little avail. Harry noticed a couple of notes amongst the copper, but he knew that it wouldn’t possibly be enough to cover it.

He hunted through his own pockets and managed to acquire £13.67. They both dropped their coins and notes onto the counter, thankful that it was a relatively quiet day and there was barely anybody in the shop besides them, and began counting. Harry finished first.

“Twenty seven pounds,” he said, hitting his forehead. “Seventy-nine pence.”

“We just need 10p then!” Louis announced, seemingly not understanding that his words could not make the silver appear out of thin air.

“I don’t have 10p,” Harry said, not able to sound irritated with Louis. The worker shrugged.

“Sorry guys,” he said, sounding significantly unapologetic. “We’re changing owners soon so I can’t really let you away with it.”

You’ll be murdered a year from now, Harry thought, by the members of your gang. I guess they couldn’t let you away with it either.

Louis’ eyes lingered upon Harry’s features, silently urging him to come up with a plan. “Well,” the green-eyed boy began hesitantly. Louis’ shoulders visibly relaxed. “I might have some change in my car...”

“Come on then,” Louis exclaimed, grabbing onto his hand suddenly (he didn’t seem to mind when Harry entwined their fingers - purely for comfort, of course).

Harry had always imagined that, if he was in an action movie, he’d be the character everybody in the cinema hated. He’d be the one who failed to grab onto something that was easily within reach, the one who lost the only gun the team had, the one that slowed him all down, simply because he was utterly useless in crisis situations. Conflict just didn’t work with him. Someone ignoring him, or him ignoring someone else, felt uncomfortable, like a weight being pressed down onto his chest. Spontaneity was lost on him, and Louis was an enigma.

That was why his heart was pounding as they ran along the pavements, Louis’ hand warm against his, breath catching in his throat as his feet slapped against the hard ground. When there was a hurricane in America, no matter how severe or slight, Britain got the tail end of it. It had been that way since Harry was a child, and, according to the Met Office, there was no sign of change. Whilst cities were ravaged by storms in the West though, the United Kingdom received nothing but rain; endless, ceaseless, ever-falling rain.  
On days such as these, barely anybody went out unless they had to lest they be branded mad in the head. Before meeting this blue-eyed wonder, Harry had been one who tended to remain indoors as well. Now, with only a brief spell of dry whilst he grabbed twenty pence from the glove-box of his car, he was dancing in the red light of the burgeoning streetlamps, kicking through puddles, not caring that the water was seeping through his white Converse and soaking the bottom of his black jeans. In many ways, Louis was rainstorms personified; unrelenting, challenging, beautiful. Absolutely fucking beautiful.

When they returned to the Tesco and slammed their money down, shaking the raindrops from their soaking wet hair, Harry noticed that Louis still hadn’t let go of his hand.

*

Cameron Diaz was lamenting on the doucheiness of her fictional boyfriend when Louis took a break from eating to bring up what was quickly becoming Harry’s least favourite topic.

“Mark said that too, you know,” he muttered, his torso pressed against Harry’s. Each point of contact burned insatiably, doing nothing but make him want more, more, _more_. “That I was bad at... naked stuff.”

“Sex?” Harry laughed, ruffling Louis’ hair when a faint blush appeared on his cheeks. (He wondered briefly why the only mention of the boy’s partner that day had been negative.) “Well, I can tell you here and now you’re not.”

The characters in the movie were making out now, stumbling around a broken down English cottage, bumbling towards the bedroom with a bottle of wine. The living room, which had been brightly lit at the beginning of the movie, was now rapidly reducing in light.

“How would you know?” Louis asked, not looking at Harry but sounding faintly amused. “We’ve never even kissed.”

“Was that an invitation?” Harry said before he could stop himself. Louis’ head snapped around, and quickly, suddenly, Harry received a painful dig in the ribs.

“Be serious for a moment, please,” Louis scrunched his eyebrows together, looking more confused puppy than determined. “How would you know?”

What Harry _wanted_ to say: “Because you’ve been doing an awful good job of making me want you since the day and hour we met.”

What Harry _actually_ said: “Dunno. I just have a feeling you’re amazing.”

“Is it because of my unending charisma and charm?” Louis teased, scrunching his nose. Harry grinned at him.

“Something like that,” he mumbled. For a brief, shining moment, a wave of courage bubbled up inside of him. He was confident, for the first time, in his own conversation, so sure of what he was going to say and what he was going to do after he had said it that it was more than faintly aggravating when Zayn interrupted the entire goddamn thing.

The click of the front door echoed through the apartment, and Zayn’s voice cut cleanly through the atmosphere like a butcher’s knife. “I swear to God, Harry,” he yelled. “If I come around this corner and you’re fucking someone on our sofa you’ll be the one cleaning up.”

Louis was sitting with his hand over his mouth, chuckling quietly but insistently, his body shaking as Harry quaked with embarrassment. “He doesn’t know you’re here,” Harry muttered. The clang of keys dropping in the dish beside the door bounced off the walls. “No shit, Sherlock,” Louis responded, his eyes gleaming in the dark. “Be quiet, I want to scare him.”

Harry opened his mouth to say something, anything; either that Zayn wasn’t as easily terrified as Louis might like, or what he had been aching to utter ever since they had first met. But then Zayn appeared around the door of the living room, a small, knowing smirk on his handsome features, not flinching a millimetre when Louis jumped out at him from the dark.

“Oh, so you _did_ have a hot date tonight,” Zayn laughed, pushing Louis away playfully. Harry raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Niall saw the two of you talking,” he explained in his same, careful tone. “He assumed you’d be spending the night together.”

“As friends, though,” Louis said pointedly. “Didn’t Niall tell you that?”

“Two platonic gay bro pals hanging out, watching The Holiday...” Harry provided, standing up from the sofa to join the two.

“Cameron Diaz is a wonderful woman,” Louis grinned. “And Kate Winslet, ugh. Girls like that might just turn you straight.”

“I dunno man,” Harry said, shaking his head. “In a world where Channing Tatum exists, can any man truly be heterosexual?”

“You make a good point!”

Zayn, obviously not sure of how to respond, just smiled. “Are you two going to get together then, or should I ask Niall for my money back?”

“Did you seriously place bets on my dating life?” Harry asked, his mouth dropping open. He had always assumed that when Niall spoke of bookmakers in the past during his various relationships he was joking, but Zayn had a way of making you trust that he was being serious. It made him a dangerous person to mess with at least, but an amazingly reliable best friend.

“Of course,” Zayn said, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. Louis was chuckling in the background, high-fiving him when he thought Harry wasn’t looking.

“I’m sorry to tell you this Z,” Louis apologised, grinning. “But I have a boyfriend, and he is not this fine specimen right here.”

“We’re just friends, Zayn,” Harry reiterated, taking the coat from Zayn’s shoulders and hanging it up on the hook in the hallway.

“Is the movie over, then?” his roommate asked, squinting through the darkness at them. Louis nodded, although it was barely noticeable through the gloom. “Can I turn on the lights then, or would you lovebirds like them kept off?”

“Friends,” Harry repeated, but Zayn and Louis both just grinned and collapsed onto the sofa as if they’d been mates for years.

Everything was coming so perfectly together, Harry thought as he flicked on the light switch. You can go days, weeks, months without experiencing anything and then it all comes bombarding at you at once, in an endless flurry of excitement and passion and blue eyes.

“Do you want to play Fifa with us, Harry?” Louis asked kindly, patting the sofa beside him. It was only a two seat, so there was no chance of him fitting, but Louis was insistent.

They ended up basically on top of each other, Zayn somehow remaining untouched at the other end. Louis was sitting on Harry’s knee so that he could feel everything pressed against him; back to stomach and hips to crotch and ass to dick and he wasn’t getting hard as Louis rocked back and forth, pressing furiously on the buttons of the controller, he wasn’t getting hard.

In The Holiday, Cameron Diaz’s character narrated her life through a series of movie trailers. Harry imagined that if he should do the same thing it would be something like this:

_Louis and Harry are young, dumb best friends, slowly falling in love underneath the stars. Louis doesn’t think he’s seen anything more beautiful than the person beside him on the grass and Harry is so gone for this boy._

_“Make a wish.”_

_“You.”_

_And that’s it, so beautifully simple, colliding into each other as if the world had deemed it to be so since the beginning of time, like it was meant to be that when Harry looked at the stars he would forever think of Louis._

“You’re still losing, aren’t you?” Louis’ voice cut through, the only interruption Harry had ever been in love with. He looked over to see Zayn’s hand clamped over Louis’ eyes, blocking the blue irises from view.

“No,” Zayn answered grumpily, a pout dancing over his handsome features. “You’ve been playing this since birth, it’s hardly fair.”

“I appreciate your argument,” Louis retorted. “But Fifa hasn’t been out that long, unfortunately.”

“I need to do... something,” Harry said, pushing Louis off his knee slightly. Louis let out a groan of frustration and put his hand out to stop him from moving, resting his fingers against Harry’s thigh, gripping it tightly.

“Don’t you leave me here alone with this barbarian,” Louis whispered darkly as Zayn smirked in the background. “I think he might torture me to find out my virtual football secrets.”

“Louis, seriously, let go...”

“I’m not letting go unless you have vodka.”

And Harry, having the distinct impression that alcohol and Louis should not be mixed but also not having the strength to deny him anything, jumped off the sofa, hanging onto Louis’ fingers until it was impossible not to let go.

Four hours later and they were sitting on each other’s lap once again, not that they had ever left the confines of each other’s arms. The Playstation remotes lay abandoned on the floor beside them, dull and dark and black, and Zayn was passed out over the arm of the sofa and muttering something in his sleep. Their lips were mere inches away from each other.

He could taste the Jack Daniels (the only drink they had left after Zayn downed the Smirnoff), the breath evaporating off his neck, tingling the blood in his veins, making him feel nothing but _LouisLouisLouis_. It was infuriating, to be this close with clouded thoughts and shifting emotions, and to have Louis mumbling, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I shouldn’t be doing this, MarkMarkMark” which then descended into one, careful, barely audible whisper that sounded like a prayer on the wind.

“ _Harry_.”

He wasn’t sure who started it, and it seemed intent on never ending, but in the heat of the moment all that he could consider was metaphors; one shining brightly as the building anticipation mounded in his stomach like a drum-roll leading to a chorus in a band, the thumping of feet against an army base, a rainstorm over the Amazon. 

Their lips touched.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has continued reading so far! I have been going through a bit of writer's block these past few days and so I'm not sure if these past two chapters are up to par with the first, but I'm not sure if that's just me being pernickety! Please leave kudos or comments if you've enjoyed these chapters, and thank you so so so much if you have already! xx  
> \- L


	4. Chapter 4

When Harry woke up, alcohol addled and somewhat confused, the first thing he thought of was the taste of Louis’ mouth and the sweetness that should’ve lingered hours afterwards. However, when he licked along the pink of his own lips, he could taste nothing but spirits upon the skin, mingling with morning breath.

“Morning, darling,” a voice said, unmistakeably Zayn. Harry looked up from the sofa, peering out over the arm as he clutched on desperately to his pillow. His back was aching, and he could hardly wait to stand up and feel the shooting pain dance down his spine. The agony would undoubtedly follow him throughout the day when he sat in the plain, un-cushioned seats of the lecture theatre. “You must’ve drunk through the entire cupboard. We’ll not have enough money to buy more till next Tuesday.”

University without booze was like tearing a plaster off your arm slowly; the modern form of torture, but all Harry could focus on was the scent of coffee that hung tantalisingly in the air. Zayn passed a steaming mug into Harry’s outstretched, veined hands and settled on the edge of the sofa. His hand moved over Harry’s curls, stroking them comfortingly.

This hang-over rehabilitation ritual had been designed during high school, long before Harry and Zayn were even friends. They had hung around in the same circles and communicated almost solely with cursory glances and the occasional ‘hi’, but the second their loser mates passed out on the floor beside them – some from drink and some from drugs – Zayn and Harry would always find a quiet place and comfort each other. Zayn was the first person, preceding even Niall, that Harry divulged the secret of his sexuality (not that it was much of a shock, to be fair).

“What time is it?” Harry asked, thinking of his class that began at three. Zayn continued caressing his hair.

“It’s only ten,” Zayn said. “I wanted to give you a lie-in. You looked like you needed it.”

“Gee thanks mate,” Harry said, pulling himself up on Zayn’s strong shoulders so that he was sitting leaned against him. “It really adds to a guy’s confidence, there.”

“I’m being honest. That’s what we promised each other, right?”

Before they had moved into their London apartment Zayn and Harry had been crying over their corresponding break-ups; Zayn with a girl named Perrie who was probably his first real love, and Harry with a guy named Paul who didn’t really mean anything much but was still painful regardless. They’d been discussing universities for a while now, both in and out of school during their various projects, and eventually, after much deliberation, they chose an apartment and moved out of their parents’ the night of graduation from A Level. The only thorn in his side, in Harry’s opinion, was the fact that Zayn knew Paul was going to break up with him before he did and hadn’t said a thing.

“I was trying to preserve your feelings!” Zayn had exclaimed repeatedly on the plane, Harry still annoyed with him a month after the fact. “We’re going to be spending 24/7 with each other the moment this plane lands, you realise that? You can’t keep ignoring me.”

Harry was about to protest that yes, he actually could keep ignoring him and would be doing so for the foreseeable future, but then the flashing light appeared: Zayn had ten years left before his smoking caught up to him. “Fine,” he said eventually, not really wanting to spend his life regretting silent moments with his best friend. “But we make a deal, okay? We tell each other everything from today on. Otherwise, we can’t be friends.”

It was an ultimatum, and it pissed Zayn off (he could tell by the vein popping in the base of his neck) but ultimately he agreed. They spent the rest of the flight laughing with each other, watching crappy movies that did nothing else but waste Hollywood’s money and drinking cheap, shitty wine.

There were very few days Harry thought were perfect, but that hour with Zayn miles above the clouds he considered idyllic (that, the day he saved his father’s life and meeting Louis battled for the top spot).

“Yeah,” he said, returning to the present with a sleepy smile on his face. “So can you answer me a question then?”

Zayn knew what he was to ask before he had even begun. “Louis woke up half an hour before you,” he explained. “He got some kind of phone call – I think it was from the boyfriend, he got all blushy – and then he ran out, thanking me for the coffee. He said he’d call you later or something and for me to apologise for him.”

‘The least he could’ve done was say goodbye,’ Harry thought grumpily to himself, but after remembering that the kiss didn’t actually happen (the details were becoming smudged in the way dreams did after a couple minutes wakening) he wasn’t quite sure why he was irritated.

“I thought his boyfriend was out of the city,” he settled upon, deciding that to divulge any of his other feelings to Zayn would only result in a cocky expression and an, ‘I told you so’ (he was so not in the mood for ‘I told you so’). “How could he call him?”

“God, I don’t know,” Zayn breathed, sounding slightly exasperated, but Harry knew he was lying. Zayn was perhaps the most perceptive person he had ever met. That, and his dashing good looks, made him the perfect candidate to join the Secret Service and become some kind of field detective, or whatever they were called. God, it was only morning and he was craving alcohol. “I wasn’t listening in on his conversation, Harry.”

“I wasn’t asking you to,” Harry protested. “Of course, if you had, I wouldn’t mind. It would be strictly between us.”

“I tried,” Zayn admitted, sipping on his own hot drink. “But he was speaking all quietly and really, really quickly. I couldn’t pick him up without pressing my ear against the door. That wouldn’t exactly be subtle.”

“No, I don’t suppose it would’ve been,” Harry conceded. There was a brief silence, resting heavily against their shoulders, infiltrating every thought so that every minor consideration was slowed down. It was a hazy morning, the perfect time to spend with Louis, he imagined. Instead, Louis was with someone who didn’t give a crap and Harry was sitting with his best friend, drowning in the realisation that they hadn’t kissed.

It was a good thing, really. To kiss Louis would mean potentially breaking up a couple, and, just as he had so vehemently protested beforehand, Harry was against that sort of thing. So it was best for them to remain friends, no matter how much more he desired with every fibre of his being.

“Can I talk to you about something?” Zayn asked, resting his back against the sofa, moulding into the cushions. Harry often marvelled at the way that Zayn could look so comfortable in every situation. He was the definition of the word ‘casual’ (sometimes he wondered if it was a front for his burgeoning anxiety).

“Of course,” Harry said, finishing off the last of his coffee. The remaining powder residue stuck in the back of his throat, threatening to choke him. “You can tell me anything, you know that.”

“Say someone liked someone who was a friend,” Zayn began, refusing to look into Harry’s eyes. “And the friend was with someone else.”

“Like a love triangle?”

“Exactly, but not really _love_ exactly, just... like, you know?”

Was this an intelligent way of getting Harry to provide his own advice, or was Zayn actually asking for himself or, dare he say it, a friend? Harry could never tell; his voice remained the same lying or otherwise.

“So this person, let’s call them Jim, likes his friend who is with someone else,” Harry repeated, not daring to remove his eyes from the side of Zayn’s face. The dark haired boy nodded. His coffee cup lay abandoned on the floor. A lighter danced on the tips of his fingers.

“Jim is really confused, okay, because he knows that he shouldn’t like this person, alright? They’re just meant to be friends. What should Jim do?” He propped a cigarette in the corner of his mouth with fluency, puffing away despite the earliness of the day.

Harry pondered over this for a few seconds. “Well, it depends,” he said eventually. “Would Jim be better for this person than the person’s person would be?”

“That makes no sense,” Zayn laughed, but he was smiling so Harry knew he had got it. “Not better, necessarily. But Jim would definitely love them more, he knows that.”

Here came the argument that had been undoubtedly debated before in their group of friends, usually between Harry and Liam. Was love all that it took to make a relationship work?

Shakespeare, poems, books, movies, advertisements, typical love songs, they’d all make you want to believe that if you adored this person – cherished every goddamn ounce of their meagre human form, thought of them as an extension of some holy being – it would be enough to withstand all the forces of nature, all powers of oppression, maybe even the ability to know when a person would die.

This was what Young Harry had clung to for the majority of his life, basking in the knowledge that someday there would be a soulmate, his definition of perfection, and they would round the corner and crash into him unexpectedly and that would be it; the entire world would fall into place almost instantaneously. However, as he had gotten older, there came the time-honoured tradition of losing the innocence of youth, the mysticism of the world around him, and he had startlingly realised that there were many things to look for in an ideal partner that had nothing to do with the sparkle that appeared in their eyes when they looked at you; things such as chemistry, financial security, position on the globe, whether they like tomato ketchup or mustard on their burger, things like that.

Because, ultimately, it was the tiny things that mattered, whether they knew your favourite chocolate and bought it for you when you were feeling down, if they rested their head on your shoulder when you needed nothing more than another human’s touch. The little things were important, even more important than the big things, Harry thought, and they were often the most cherished.

(Louis had slight freckles on his cheeks in the right light. He put milk into his tea first. He loved romantic comedies that starred Jude Law and Jack Black. He chose movies based on their cover, not other’s recommendations. He was so in love with someone who didn’t care.)

If love was all it took, Louis and Mark would be together forever, undoubtedly. Louis had enough adoration inside of his small frame to keep a country alive and in power if love was an energy source. Harry would spend his life wondering, considering what could’ve happened if he had kissed Louis on that movie night, probably destined to continue on alone, pathetic, tired of his miserable life...

He was getting dramatic. This was exactly why he detested drinking; it brought out the worst side of him.

“Well,” Harry started, trying to figure out what to say and how to say it. “Love is the main thing, of course it is, but there are other factors too. Like, does Jim know for sure that it will all work out? Does anybody ever know? Does Jim’s person love him back? Will he ever know that?”

Zayn looked even more confused.

“Basically,” Harry sighed. “What I’m saying is, I’m a big believer in fate. And if Jim’s person just so happens to come crashing in drunk one night and kisses him full on the mouth, then that’s all that matters, because he would be the first person they thought of with alcohol in their veins.”

His friend considered this. “So, what you’re saying is... I-Jim should just leave it and see what happens?”

“It is what it is,” Harry said wisely. “The world’s a weird place, but everything happens for a reason.”

“Yeah,” Zayn said, somewhat absentmindedly, but Harry’s thoughts were already elsewhere.

After all, they’d never _cancelled_ their plans to meet at the park.

Right?

*

Wrong.

Harry had always thought it would take a significant moment of impact in order to make his world fall apart.

He was wrong. So very wrong.

All it took was the sight of Louis that morning, shining in the sunlight, up against a tree, Mark’s strong arms wrapped around the trunk, pinning him down. Their lips were making sloppy noises around each other.

The figurative heart-wrench felt a lot more painful than he had expected it to. He’d never really felt this strongly towards anyone before, and now, here he was, looking on from behind a hedge as the kiss he wasn’t a part of intensified.

It was creepy in many, many ways, and he knew it, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from their bodies, from the way that Louis whimpered slightly, the red of his cheeks, the hair that stuck slightly to his forehead. He was wearing the same clothes as he had been the previous day, and they were slightly crumpled from sleeping in them and damp from the rain.

Sometimes no words could be used to describe the pure elation Harry felt when his eyes rested upon Louis. This wasn’t one of those times.

Back in high school, there was a trend that the ‘popular’ kids would post poorly photo-shopped versions of various famous people quotes. It was a way to throw unmistakable shade towards someone who had wronged them. It was juvenile, and thankfully Harry had never been one to follow society’s path, so he never joined in on the bickering that ultimately resulted in the comments section. As he got older he could further ponder over the insignificance of those stupid quotes.

‘What if he’s your Prince Charming, but you’re not his Cinderella’ was a particular favourite of Gemma’s, and if she hadn’t have been his sister Harry would probably have hit her for her stupidity. These quotes about relationships that would never truly alter the course of one’s life were ridiculous, insignificant, didn’t bear relevance.

Yet, despite his condemnations of the quotes, Harry found himself repeating them, over and over in his mind, until he wasn’t quite sure which ones had been a favourite of his classmates and which he had decided upon himself.

If love was a crime scene, you’d be the one with the gun.

Should I smile because I am your friend or cry because that is all I will ever be.

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter... Wait, they were moving.

It was just to get to a more comfortable (for Mark) position for kissing. What else was he expecting?

Harry squinted in the direction of the couple, focusing on keeping the sign illuminated for longer than he had before. Eighteen years until Mark died in a train crash. Eighteen years. Why should he live longer than Louis?

...

Harry Styles was a disgusting human being (even if what he was saying did have premise).

He would’ve been content to stay wallowing in his own self-misery, focusing only on the beating of his heart in his ears and trying to stay hidden amongst the foliage, except for the fact that Zayn ruined the whole goddamn thing by phoning. Thankfully, he hadn’t gotten around to changing his phone from the default ringer, so everybody with an iPhone in the nearby vicinity checked their pockets, meaning he could continue to relax in secrecy.

“What do you want?” Harry whispered harshly into the phone, barely able to squeeze out a word because of the tightness in his chest and the large lump in his throat. He was burning with desire and all that Louis was managing to do was extinguish it, kiss by unrelenting kiss.

Zayn chuckled through the line. Harry could see the line of his jaw, the stupid smugness on his handsome face, and he almost wanted to throttle him. “I was just phoning you to say your darling left his jacket last night in the rush to leave. Just in case you’re with him now.”

“What makes you think that?” Harry asked hurriedly, panicking that somehow Zayn was in the park, watching him hiding from the boy like a pathetic primary school child flees from the bell at the end of break-time.

“You seem so smitten with him I just...”

“He’s with his boyfriend,” came the sob, the stupid, tearing up, weak voice that Harry detested so deeply. “Right now. He’s ki-ki-kissing him and I dun want him to, Zayn.”

Silence.

His strength returned with a wave of irritation. “I swear to God, Zayn, if you say anything snarky, or bitchy, or downright rude, I’m never coming home.”

“Harry,” Zayn said. His name sounded like perfection upon his best friend’s lips; leaking sentiment like poison. He’d never heard it spoken so softly before by anybody except for Dream Louis and his own mother. “Harry, walk away. It won’t do you any good to watch that...”

“Oh, what do you know about it?” Harry snapped, pushing himself off the ground. He stomped away, no longer caring whether Louis caught a glimpse of his brunette curls from the vantage point over Mark’s shoulder. “You have no idea, Zayn, no idea at all. You can have anybody you want...”

“Except who I need,” was his reply, but it was mumbled, and Harry was crying, the tears staining his porcelain cheeks, stinging his skin. “Listen to me Harry you don’t want to do anything stupid, so just come home and we can chill for a while before class, k?”

“What about his jacket?”

“What does the jacket matter now, Harry?”

“I knew he had a boyfriend before, I should’ve just let it go, I should’ve just...” He stopped and inhaled sharply. “I’ll just drop into his house and leave it off to his roommate, Eleanor.”

“Are you sure that is such a good idea?” Zayn asked, obviously thinking that it wasn’t such a good idea. (Harry wished he would just say so. He felt himself resenting in that moment Zayn’s passive aggressive nature in both advice and argument.)

“I’m positive,” he responded, wiping his face with the cuff of his sleeve, because it was ridiculous, wasn’t it, to be crying over someone he had only just met. After all, this wasn’t some Rose and Jack shit, this was real life, and people just didn’t fall in love with people they’d just met, it wasn’t the way life worked...

“I’ll leave it out outside the front door then,” Zayn said.

“Why can’t I come in?” he asked.

“Liam’s here.”

“So?”

“Well... um... Liam’s here, and we’re talking about... things.”

“What kind of things?” Harry asked, switching his phone to the other ear. He was jogging now, enjoying the fact that exercise erased feelings of Louis, took the stone out of his chest.

“Nothing bad,” Zayn said hurriedly. “I just didn’t think you’d want to be stopped going round to Louis and Eleanor’s, that’s all.”

“You make a good point,” Harry responded, looking down at his watch. “She’ll be heading to class soon, I expect.”

“Did Louis say what she’s studying?”

“He did but I was too busy...” Looking at the blue of his eyes and the size of his ass, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Zayn. “I didn’t listen.”

“Hey, if it’s Eleanor from Politics, could you get her number for Niall? He’s been yapping about her for ages, apparently she’s gorgeous.”

Harry rolled his eyes although Zayn couldn’t see. “Because that’s my mission in life: getting Niall laid.”

“Well, one of us might as well have a sex life,” Zayn muttered, sounding disgruntled.

“Liam does. He can’t put Sophia down.”

“... Bye Harry.”

The phone call ended with a faint click when Harry was mere doors away from their apartment building. He looked down at the phone (which now had a text from Louis saying, _‘Sorry baby, didn’t mean to run out, Mark phoned, got home early so I had to go see him. Talk soon?’_ ) and shook his head.

Why did everything have to be so complicated?

*

Zayn had been right about one thing. Eleanor was pretty.

She looked almost exactly like Louis; same brow, same face shape, even a similar nose. It was hard to imagine that they weren’t actual siblings, but, according to Louis, they were as good as anyways. Perhaps they were the kind of friends that were so close they morphed into one, singular being.

A raised eyebrow and a, “Do I know you?” later and Harry was sitting in the expanse of Louis’ apartment being served tea and biscuits by his roommate. She was thin, probably the type Mark would go for, and dressed impeccably in a Peter Pan collar shirt and a pair of ironed shorts.

“You say you know Louis, then?” she said. Harry watched her, and yes, she did put her milk in first as well. Maybe this was where Louis had developed the habit. “Come to think of it, he did mention a tall, dark, handsome waiter the night he got stood up.”

“Did he finally admit it?” Harry asked, feeling close enough to Eleanor through their shared infatuation with Louis to ask her teasing questions. Eleanor rolled her eyes and sat down on the other side of the table (their apartment was much bigger than Harry and Zayn’s; they actually had a dining area!).

“Of course not,” she said, pushing forward the selection of Bourbons and Jammy Dodgers. “Louis Tomlinson is many things, and oblivious is one of them. He still thinks that douche-bat had a good reason to dump him, even though he couldn’t even be arsed making an excuse.”

The flat smelt good, like cinnamon and potpourri. It was impeccably clean, not a sliver of dust in sight apart from one corner of the living room in which Harry expected was Louis’. In that space there were books and a laptop and a tablet all piled up amongst seemingly thousands of DVDs. Harry always loved seeing others’ houses, where they spent their time, especially if they were as inherently fascinating as Louis. It provided a sense of normalcy, and a reminder that Louis was, as all people were, still a human.

“I’m guessing you don’t like Mark either, then,” Harry stated, finishing off several biscuits that had miraculously appeared on his plate despite refusing them multiple times.  
“What is there to like, really?” Eleanor asked, leaning back against the chair. Her knees were pressing against the table. “Apart from his face, and looks fade. At least that’s what my granddad says.”

Suddenly, Harry was struck with the unrelenting notion that Eleanor would be the perfect girl to knock some sense into Niall. “You know,” he said, his fingers still remaining in the pockets of Louis’ jacket. “I have a friend. Blond, Irish...”

“Niall Horan,” she said, almost automatically.

“That’s the one.”

“That prick better not be asking for his shoes back,” she snapped, her once pristine face crumpled in displeasure. “Is that why you’re here? To get me to go crawling to him?”

“I wasn’t aware you had a history, actually,” Harry said, watching in amusement as a blush settled over her cheeks. “I was just going to ask if you would take his number, but apparently you already have it.”

“I’m going to have to explain this now, aren’t I?” she said, noticeably cringing.

“But of course,” Harry laughed. “This’ll be fun, I can tell.”

Eleanor would die three weeks after her hundredth birthday. Harry wondered what she would do with all of that time.

“It’s nothing exciting, really...” she began, but, unfortunately, as all great and amazing moments in his life had been lately, they were interrupted.

By Louis, who appeared with messed up hair and bleeding lips that Harry couldn’t kiss, he couldn’t even fucking look at him without bursting into tears.

It was embarrassing, really. He wasn’t some pathetic teenage girl. He was a grown ass nineteen-year-old man.

“Harry,” Louis said, somewhat surprised, as he swung his arm around Eleanor and lifted her off her feet in a hug. “What is my favourite waiter doing in my humble abode?”

Harry wasn’t sure whether he was asking him or his roommate, so he let Eleanor do the talking.

“He just came around to give you back your jacket,” she explained. “We were having a nice little chat before you so rudely interrupted.”

“Oh God no!” Louis exclaimed, grinning fiendishly. “How dare I intrude upon your little meet and greet? What were you discussing so intently?”

“She slept with Niall,” Harry piped up, not able to conceal this delicious fact any longer.

Louis wrinkled his nose. “The Irish twat you mentioned?”

“The very one.” Déjà-vu was a weird-ass phenomenon.

“And I was just about to tell him to mind his own business,” Eleanor finished, but she was still smiling, so he didn’t take it seriously. “I don’t want to talk about Niall Horan ever again, if I can help it. God, if I even saw him I think I’d shoot him in the dick. And, by the way,” she said, throwing a glance in Harry’s direction. “I didn’t sleep with him. My best friend did.”

Harry, with his mouth dropped open in shock, turned around to Louis, who immediately put his hands up. “It wasn’t me,” he protested. “And I am very offended that I’m not your best friend, Ellie.”

“Don’t call me Ellie,” she mumbled dangerously. For once, Louis Tomlinson backed down.

“Alright, touchy,” he laughed, squeezing her arm more tightly (how Harry wished he was her). “I see you’ve been enjoying tea and biscuits without me.”

“You’ve been replaced,” Eleanor said smoothly. “By someone much more attractive, much smarter and much nicer too, asshole.”

“I was obviously attractive enough for you to go out with me,” Louis declared. He turned around to Harry, his blue eyes sparkling with mischief.

“We went out in high school for a while before I came out to her kicking and screaming,” Louis explained to a baffled and bemused Harry. “And then we kept it going for a while too, just to throw the other guys off my trail, you know? I wanted to get on the football team.”

Harry understood. People who thought the world was much more accepting of gays now than it ever had before were living in a false sense of security that they were the beginning of a revolution. No generation ever was, not really.

“It was fun telling my parents you were into butt-stuff,” Eleanor said, laughing at the memory. Louis joined in. At that moment, all Harry wanted to do was sit down in between them on their expensive looking white leather sofa and listen to all of the stories of their time being friends, partners in crime, platonic soulmates. But unfortunately time was of the essence, and a law degree was waiting for him three years from now if he could manage to keep his grades up. It was already two o’clock (where does the time go?). “They’re all religious and God-fearing. Absolutely hilarious. Dad went purple.”

“I would love to discuss this further, but I really need to go to the little boy’s room,” Louis said, placing a chaste kiss on Eleanor’s cheek before letting her go. Harry pouted, pretending to be offended, and Louis copied the action on his face on the way to the bathroom. His lips burnt into Harry’s skin, stubble rubbing against the softness of his cheeks.  
Harry decided to take this moment to talk to someone with what was assumed knowledge of the Christian Bible. All of his friends were either Muslim, agnostic or atheist, and so he thought of this as the one chance he would have to see if he was completely antagonistic.

“Hey, Eleanor,” he said, lingering in the doorframe.

“Hey, Harry,” she responded, a dimple appearing in her cheek.

“Say someone knew exactly when and how people were going to die.”

“Is this a book plot or something?” Eleanor asked, raising an eyebrow. Harry nodded hurriedly, thankful that she lied so he didn't have to. “Well, from what I know nobody knows when people are going to die besides the creator. Not even the Son, just the Father.”

“No, but the person in the book...” Harry paused. “Jim. Jim has the ability to know these things, and like he isn’t the Messiah or Jesus or anything, he’s just a normal guy who’s been doing this forever. What do you think of that?”

Eleanor let out a long, drawn out sigh. “God, I dunno Harry,” she said, exasperated. “I’m not into all that voodoo stuff. If you’re interested in writing something like that, maybe you should look into psychics and all. Couldn’t that be what Jim is?”

“Yeah,” Harry said, feeling that she had provided more questions than answers and annoyed that he had been expecting something else. “Yeah, I suppose. Thanks, El.”

“Welcome, Harry.”

The door shut with a faint click behind him. He leaned against it, looking up at the cracked ceiling of the university hallway, thinking that about how it was a long way down and he was afraid of heights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to thank everyone who has pressed the kudos button or taken the time to write comments on this fic, you have been the encouragement I needed to keep writing! Hopefully the next chapter will come soon :) Thank you all for reading, it means so much xx


	5. Chapter 5

_‘We’ll disappear, your secret’s safe, no one has to know I’m your getaway.’_

It was three months on, and now even the radio in Harry’s car was mocking him with thoughts of Louis.

There was one thing that was official; he was in love with the guy. It was unavoidable, really, and to think that he was strong enough to resist the beauty that was Louis Tomlinson was laughable. It was like sitting down through a really rocking concert, or even a particularly average one, despite the fact you paid for seats – everyone who met Louis had a 9/10 chance of falling for him. It was considered the norm.

Harry _loved_ adoring Louis; the tightness in his chest, the rushing in his head, the butterflies in his stomach all screaming his name in the same deafening chorus. Over the past couple of weeks, Harry’s thoughts consisted of Louis and mostly Louis, and that was alright with him, all until he couldn’t breathe around him for a reason other than teenage love.

When you saw Louis with Mark, you’d understand why Harry deemed him a whole new league of breathtaking. His eyes sparkled, his teeth shined as he grinned away. In fact, the only time that he stopped smiling was when they kissed, and Harry could feel a little bit of himself melt away with every careful touch and gentle caress Louis bestowed upon his boyfriend.

He supposed he had to be grateful. They had fallen into each other - in a friendship way - more quickly perhaps than any two boys ever had before. If he hadn’t have been living with Zayn and Louis with Eleanor, it would be inevitable that they would’ve moved in together. It just felt _right_ for some reason; they had divulged so much of themselves so quickly – Harry telling Louis everything but his affections towards him and Louis the same – that it was unprecedented. Even with Zayn or Niall it had taken years for Harry to build up the level of friendship it usually took to speak of things such as existential beings or how much the sun weighed, but with Louis nothing was off limits. Absolutely nothing (apart from everything).

August 10th was almost exclusively taken up with packing for their yearly trip to Ireland. Ever since they had attended university, Niall had been homesick, so much so that he couldn’t sleep for the first couple of weeks in September. Therefore the boys had teamed together two years ago to buy them all plane tickets to Dublin, resulting in a bunch of happy tears and Niall using a bevy of exclamation marks on his tweets about the journey. It had become something of a tradition, and each time they went there was someone new to come along. The last trip it had been Perrie and Liam’s ex-girlfriend Danielle, this year it was Sophia, Louis and Eleanor.

They didn’t invite Mark.

If lying was a sin worthy of going to hell over, Harry wasn’t going to make it to heaven after all. Zayn said he was very convincing as he made up a story on the spot about how it was _far_ cheaper to purchase seven tickets to the Irish capital than eight, and how his own mother was paying for it and he really didn’t want to make her pay the extra money to get a seat beside the rest of them. Louis had shrugged and said, “It’s alright. Me and him have been arguing a bit anyways. Maybe a break will be good for us” whilst Eleanor smirked in the background.

Perhaps he wasn’t so subtle, but it seemed to convince Louis, and so he considered it a success.

“Zayn,” Harry called, pausing in his packing for a moment to wait for his friend to walk in. The dark haired boy, already puffing on a cigarette (“I’m compensating for the lack of smoking on the plane”) leaned against the wall of Harry’s bedroom, looking only mildly interested. “Do you think I’d need to bring these jeans?” he asked, setting out several pairs of almost identical black skinny jeans.

Zayn glanced at the trousers and the focused back on the smoke swirling in spirals towards the ceiling. “They’re all the same, Harry,” he said exasperatedly. “Just pick one or two pairs and hurry up. Lou and El are coming around in a half hour with the car.”

Harry groaned, flinging his head back so that it rested against the side of his mattress. “You don’t _understand_ ,” he whined, flicking through the t-shirt pile beside his bed. “They’re all different sizes and cuts... This one has holes in the knees, this one doesn’t. This one flatters my ass, this one flattens it. This is all important, Zayn.”

He laughed lowly, suddenly understanding. “You just want to overwhelm Louis with your white boy ass and your long, model-like legs, don’t you?”

Harry, not sure whether to be offended at the description of his booty or slightly complimented, shook his head furiously. “Of course not!” he exclaimed. “What do you take me for, some kind of man-whore determined to get nothing out of this trip besides Louis?”

“Well,” Zayn said in between puffs. “You do have it bad for him. I could’ve told you that months ago.”

“Oh Mr Malik, the great and mighty, how am I ever going to be worthy enough to be your friend?” Harry said sarcastically. “Seriously, though, ‘I told you so’ seems to be your default setting.”

“All I’m saying is that we’re going to Ireland to have fun, not watch you pine over someone who’s already taken.”

Zayn was being unfair, and he knew it, but Harry was too emotionally exhausted to care. His exam results had came back only that morning, which at least reduced some of the anxiety building in his stomach (he had achieved the marks required to get an A grade) but had left him thoroughly energy void.

“I promise, Zayn,” Harry said, smiling up at his friend from the floor. “We’ll get wasted almost every night. We’ll kiss the Blarney Stone and go to the zoo, and everything will be fine, really.”

Zayn had been tense about the whole trip also, but less noticeably than Harry, so nobody apart from him had even asked the brown-eyed boy about it. Harry picked it up through several passive aggressive comments, and he got that Zayn wasn’t particularly fond of Sophia for whatever reason. Apparently saying, “Well _I_ think she’s delightful” wasn’t the right thing to say.

“I don’t want to get wasted,” he protested, snubbing his cigarette off the bottom of his shoe. Zayn had done this once in Louis’ place, and Eleanor near had a fit about ashes on the carpet. Harry couldn’t even _see_ his floor for the clutter, so he could honestly care less (it was the smoke itself that made him choke back with watery eyes). “I don’t really like the feeling, you know that.”

He was the type of person to prefer knowing exactly what he had done the night before. This was another one of their differences; Zayn wanted to be able to remember every second of his life and every person he had ever kissed, whereas Harry was more than happy to forget every now and again.

“Fine, then we’ll stay inside with Niall’s mum and baby Theo and knit,” he said, smiling as he thought of the child. He was only a couple of months old, and Harry couldn’t wait to meet Niall’s little nephew. Niall hadn’t seen him in real life yet; he had only experienced the newest member of the Horan family through Instagram posts and Skype calls with his brother Greg. He was perhaps even more excited about the baby than he was about the prospect of the pubs near his hometown, which were apparently much better than English ones (Harry tended to agree. Irish men were hilarious drunk).

Zayn let out a groan. “You make me sound like such a bore,” he moaned. “All of you guys do. Just because I don’t want to go out and bang some random girl – or guy, in you and Lou’s case – or drink until I’m comatose doesn’t make me any less of a person than you or whatever.”

“We never said that it did,” Harry mumbled, thinking distinctly that Zayn was blowing the entire thing out of proportion, which he seemed to be doing a lot lately. Hell, he was pretty sure Harry and Louis were having a secret affair they hadn’t told him about behind Mark’s back. Was there no trust anymore? “If it makes you feel any better, Sophia doesn’t like to drink much either, so her and Liam will probably stay home with you.”

“Great,” Zayn muttered. He was fumbling around in his pocket for another cigarette. Harry passed him up one from the packet he found underneath his bed. “Thanks,” he mumbled, lighting his fifth of the day. It was only nine in the morning. “That’s all I need, to spend two weeks with Mr and Mrs Smith. You know Liam wrote a poem about the beauty of her ass?”

“Did he recite it to you?” Harry asked, his eyes crinkling with laughter. Zayn shuddered at the thought, and Harry, confident that Zayn had now cheered up, stood up with two pairs of randomly chosen jeans over his arm. “I think these two will do,” he said.

“Wise choice, young one,” Zayn praised, already halfway out the door. “Now just hurry up, we’ve wasted enough time already.”

Harry shoved a few more pieces of clothing haphazardly into his suitcase, knowing that the second they touched down in Ireland Niall’s mother would tip out the contents of his bag and wash it all over again (“It has that awful plane smell,” she would say, not realising that planes didn’t really have a smell, not inside).

A car horn beeped outside his window, which faced down towards the street. He peered out over the glass and saw Louis hopping out of the car, dressed in a pair of casual blue jeans and a purple sweater that emphasised the sharpness of his features.

“Remember to pack condoms!” Zayn yelled suddenly, and Harry’s face went bright red, but he threw a couple in, just in case.

*

“Where are we going to go first?” Eleanor asked excitedly. They were all squished up in the back of her father’s people-carrier, Sophia and Eleanor in the back, Louis and Harry squashed beside Liam, Niall and Zayn chilling out in the passenger and driver’s seat. “Are we spending the night in Dublin?”

“Ai,” Niall said, his accent even thicker with the premonition of returning to the place in which everybody sounded like him. “Mum and Dad are in the Bahamas till the morrow, but they got us a couple rooms at the Premier Inn.”

“I love their colour scheme,” Louis piped up, the corner of his mouth crinkling in a smile. Harry looked over at him against the background of the moving London landscape. In fact, that was what the majority of the trip was spent doing; just sitting and admiring. Louis didn’t seem to notice. “I chose this jumper specifically to go with it.”

Sophia laughed and Eleanor rolled her eyes. Zayn kept looking in the wing mirror back at Liam, scrunching his eyebrows together. Harry had noticed some tension between them, and he hoped it wasn’t a result of the conversation that had transpired a couple of days ago, although he knew it was. He’d heard them yelling at each other through his bedroom wall (he told Zayn he slept like a baby and had witnessed nothing. May God strike him for lying).

“I just can’t wait to see Theo,” Niall enthused, turning around from the passenger seat with a wide, almost-splitting-his-face grin. “He’s bound to be so big, like his uncle.”  
Harry liked the way Niall said things – ‘Tay-oh’ instead of ‘Thee-oh’ – and he thought of this as the babble of chatter rocked through the car, everybody discussing the pure adorable nature of his little nephew.

“We’ll have to bring him to Cork,” Zayn said, the first words he had uttered since entering the car. “He’ll like Fota.”

Fota was a wildlife park about twenty minutes from Cork. Harry remembered the days in which they had spent there before, chomping on ice cream and Slush Puppies, laughing at the gorillas and zebras and whatever other animals they were. It was promoted as a ‘family day out’, and that’s what they were, after all. A family; one, big, unrelated family, tied together only by their affection for each other. Harry thought it was a beautiful thing to think that they had no physical evidence – such as blood or similar features - of their connections, yet they knew they would be together through everything.

He explained about the wildlife park to Louis, swinging his arms around and choosing the most descriptive adjectives, and watched in delight as the other boy copied his movements. Pretty soon they had divulged into an impassioned and animated conversation about the wonder of train timetables. Nobody else in the car understood it, but that was okay, because it was Louis and Harry, and their names were quickly becoming attached to each other (hell, Eleanor had said the other day that every time she considered Louis Harry had to come right after, as if they couldn’t bear to be apart even in thought).

They’d overspent on their phone contracts talking to each other all night. Three-quarters of Harry’s texting limits had went to small talk with Louis and the flipping feeling in his stomach he got every single time he saw his name on the screen. It hadn’t gotten old yet, and it had been exactly three months tomorrow morning. He wondered if Louis counted the time they had known each other, or did he not care enough?

“I woke up in an airport once,” Louis said. Liam raised his eyebrow in his direction, but he didn’t seem to be talking to anyone other than Harry, who smiled.

“Please, do tell us,” Harry teased. “How did you manage to wake up in an airport?”

“Okay, if you insist,” Louis said, smiling. His fingers drifted over the exposed skin of Harry’s forearm. “Right, so I was out with my old mate Stan – I don’t really hang out all that much with him now I’m in uni – and he was a real wildcard, if people say that now. Do they?”

“I don’t think so,” Harry answered, decidedly endeared.

“Well, whatever. I say it, so it’s a thing now.”

This was also a _thing_. About two weeks into their texting conversations (which happened just as often during exam revision even though they were both so busy) Louis would talk about something – such as Reese’s peanut butter chips or the beauty of Beyoncé – and then he would say to Harry, “That’s another thing”. They must’ve had a book of things at that point, if either of them had bothered to write it down. What was important was that Louis was depositing little bits of himself into everything Harry did, so that he couldn’t watch The Holiday or eat peanuts without thinking of the boy.

“I was out with Stan, and it was right after I failed some of the exams I really wanted to pass – but it didn’t end up mattering, did it? I still got the scholarship – so I was determined to get absolutely pissed. And I succeeded, obviously. I don’t think even Stan had drunk as many shots in one night. I knew I couldn’t go back to my mother when I could barely walk – I wouldn’t want my little sisters to see their respectable older brother talking about the shittiness of alcohol and whining about his imminent hangover – and Stan was a dickhead, like I said, so he just let me go wherever the hell I wanted. Then I woke up at an airport the next morning, having no idea how I got there.”

“Aren’t airports locked at night?” Eleanor asked, her brown eyes widening. Louis laughed.

“As if I’ve never gotten into locked places before,” he said, a smirk hanging off his lips (Harry was falling more with every passing glance). “I haven’t been to an airport since. Sad, really.”

“I’d never been on a plane till we went to Ireland the first time,” Zayn provided, peering up into the mirror, but it wasn’t to look at Louis.

“He was fucking terrified,” Niall provided.

“Planes are unnatural,” Zayn protested. “Humans aren’t meant to fly. If they were, we’d have wings.”

“He has a point,” Liam said. Zayn focused back on the road, the vein in his neck throbbing uncomfortably. “I’d rather have a boat sink than a plane crash. I can swim some, but I can fly nothing.”

“Usually crashing planes land in water though,” Sophia piped up knowledgeably. Zayn’s knuckles whitened against the steering wheel. “And then they have lifejackets and all. In fact, they’re better prepared than boats because they have air underneath them to keep them afloat, whereas boats are made of iron.”

“I can’t tell if you’re bullshitting or not,” Niall laughed. “But it’s putting me off boats, anyways.”

“Should we really be talking about crashing planes right now?” Louis asked. “Considering we’re about to get on one and all. We might jinx ourselves.”

“None of you are going to die on a plane,” Harry said determinately, rolling his eyes. The car went silent.

“How would you know that?” Eleanor asked, pushing her face through the break in the seats in front of her to speak to Harry.

“We could all perish on the car ride over,” Louis said, serious for the first time that day. “No one knows that.”

“That’s what makes life so exciting,” Niall said, somewhat giddily. “You have to live every day like your last because there’s no guarantee it won’t be.”

Harry let out a groan and thumped back against his seat. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel Louis watching him, scrutinising every inch. Instead of feeling intrusive, it felt warm, comforting, like hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day or blankets on Christmas Eve.

“Fuck, guys,” Harry said after a few seconds. It was too long, but he had to think. He opened his eyes and smiled at them, all of whom were looking at him like he was crazy. “I was just trying to be positive. You’re all talking like we’re going to die today.”

“How did we get onto this anyways?” Louis asked, laughing (he was taking the focus away from Harry, and for that he was grateful). “We were discussing trains two seconds ago.”

“You make a good point,” Liam dissented, and the group dissolved into approving nods and pursed lips.

Harry mouthed over a ‘thanks’ to Louis. Louis didn’t smile.

‘Talk to me tonight’ was his whispered response.

*

Harry had always been convinced that airports were strange places. All around him there was happy reunions with friends, family members, lovers, and yet there must’ve been others who wished they were anywhere else. Someone would be dreaming that they hadn’t left their summer fling behind in the rush to get on that plane. A woman was probably waiting for her husband to return from war, another getting only the removal of the hat and an, “I’m sorry, he was a good soldier”. A man may have been waiting for his daughter to appear, because she had vanished with her older boyfriend six months ago and had never been found by police or family. So many people, so many deaths (this was exactly why crowds gave him a headache).

Louis, who was put in charge of organising the group considering he was the only one everybody tended to listen to, didn’t seem to be aware of the different customs of travel, and so they ended up running late. Very late. Like running through the airport frantically laughing and crying and screaming at each other with blame lacing syllables late.

“You complete _arse_ Louis Tomlinson,” Eleanor shouted. They rounded the corner of the corridor, their tickets grasped in their sweaty hands. Louis had his hand hovering over the small of Harry’s back as they led everyone else in the frantic plane chase.

“We’ve got like half an hour to get to this fucking plane,” Niall puffed, his face red from the strain. “And if I miss this, I’m killing all of you, I don’t give a shit.”

“We’re not going to miss it,” Louis called back, his voice strained with laughter and adrenalin. Harry felt much the same. Something about running, the sounds of their feet pounding against the floor of the extendable corridor that would lead them to victory, the burning of the lactic acid in their veins made Harry feel alive. Combine this with the group mentality of exhaustion and panting, and it was pretty much perfection (of course, bring Louis on a trip and that would be expected). “Have a little faith in me guys, okay? When have I ever let you down?”

Louis was pretty good in crisis situations. He’d flirted his way through security, smooth-talked the receptionist to give him slightly later tickets after they got stuck in traffic and missed their first flight and had guided Sophia through the airport shopping facility when she realised they’d left her bag in the people-carrier and simply didn’t have time to go back. Now she was running along, pulling a small carry-on case filled with several clothes, her fingers entwined with Liam’s.

They were running in couples; Louis with Harry, Eleanor with Niall (they kept bickering between them, usually about the fact that they were even talking), Liam with Sophia. In fact, the only person who wasn’t part of a pair was Zayn, but he stayed relatively close to Liam at all times as he usually did. Liam and Zayn were friends like Harry and Louis were – minus the secret attraction, of course – and they just seemed to gravitate towards each other regardless of the situation. Harry thought that, in the beginning of the universe, they must’ve been one spark of light which broke apart, and now they were destined to be nowhere but beside each other. It was only nature.

It was perhaps the longest goddamn corridor Harry had ever been in but, then again, time always slowed when he looked at Louis.

“We’re going to make it!” Louis yelled triumphantly. The door to the airplane had just come into view, and yes, it was still open. They had made it. Louis slowed down a few steps before the entrance, and Harry with him. They stayed there for a few seconds as their friends filtered past them, yelling happily, piling into the aircraft. Liam was carrying Sophia’s bag now, as Niall had predicted he would despite his protests that he would not act as a donkey for his girlfriend.

Harry turned to look at Louis, his chest heaving heavily with the strain of running. “We made it,” he mumbled, grinning from ear to ear. Louis also looked as if his face may split in half with the width of his smile. He pulled Harry into a tight, honest-to-God hug, his arms wrapped so securely around the boy’s body that Harry found himself unable to breathe.  
Louis smelt nice. He smelt like cinnamon, or maybe it was Eleanor’s potpourri. There was a faint line of sweat on the nape of his neck, and Harry could feel the cold of the wind on his clothes. Harry buried his head into the crook of Louis’ neck and continued to hold him, squeezing slightly. His lips were pressed against skin.

It was over both far too early and far too late. Louis pulled away from Harry, his cheeks pleasantly pink and his smile wavering, and said, “We better actually get onto the plane.”  
Harry laughed, probably too long considering it wasn’t all that funny, and nodded. “We probably should.”

“Dibs on sitting beside you,” Louis said as they made their way along the plane towards their seats. Thankfully, their friends had saved them two seats beside each other and near a window. Eleanor had set the DVD player in their magazine rack.

“Dibs on rooming with you,” Harry responded, sliding into the leather seats of Aer Lingus. Louis mirrored his actions, and suddenly, even an armrest seemed like too much distance.

_Dibs on spending an entire two weeks with you._

*

A flight from Heathrow to Dublin typically took anything from fifty minutes to an hour and ten minutes. There was more than a few times during that period in which Harry found himself wishing it was fifty times longer.

“All best friends are destined to fall in love. Discuss,” Eleanor ordered. She was sitting in front of them and made it a habit to turn around every now and again when things got quiet. However, it wasn’t awkward or uncomfortable as most silences are; it was normal. Just that he was with Louis was the whole thing. She vanished back to her own seat beside Sophia, who was fawning over a particular watch in the on-flight catalogue. No doubt Liam would be buying it before long.

Louis looked up at Harry. He was sitting with his feet on the seat in front, so his head was resting where his butt should’ve been. The aforementioned armrest had been raised and seatbelts had been un-clicked, and somehow (don’t ask him how) Harry had ended up with half of Louis’ head on his lap. He was stroking his hair, and Louis had been complaining that he was going to put him to sleep and he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the flight then. “You heard the lady,” he quipped. “Discuss.”

“I think the whole point is that it’s a two way thing,” Harry said gently, pushing a strand of brown hair out of Louis’ blue eyes. He blinked – God, he had long eyelashes – and smiled up at the boy.

“I just like hearing you talk,” Louis said, appearing adorably tiny against the expanse of his seat. “You could read a phonebook and I’d ask to record it.”

“We should really discuss the meaning of boundaries instead,” Harry laughed, but he didn’t mind. “What do you think though? Do all best friends fall in love?”

Louis shrugged his shoulders, but it was obvious he had been thinking about it. “I mean, I _think_ people can be friends with whatever gender they’re attracted to,” he began. Harry noticed he was wringing his fingers together, as if he was nervous. Was he afraid of flying, he wondered? He hadn’t mentioned it beforehand. “But I do think that there’ll be a moment when you’ll _think_ you actually properly love that son-of-a-bitch.”

“Just a moment,” Harry repeated, raising his eyebrow. “You don’t think best friends could fall in love with each other forever?”

A loud sigh erupted from his small frame. “God, I dunno,” he moaned. “I’m not sure. Not much experience in the field, yanno? Only best friend I’ve ever had was Eleanor, and I didn’t love her in that way. Stan too, but he’s an asshole.”

“I’m not your best friend?” Harry asked, only slightly hurt, although there was no reason to be. Louis had said on multiple occasions over the past twelve weeks that Harry was his ‘all-time favourite’ and his ‘one and only’. He couldn’t think of an explanation as to why he wasn’t included this time.

“Of course you are, baby,” Louis cooed, pushing himself up on the seat so that he was sitting properly once more. He rubbed the back of his neck – “Sore,” he said – and Harry resisted the urge to massage it himself; Louis was doing it wrong. “You’re just different from the rest, you know?”

‘In what way different?’ lay upon Harry’s lips. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what he said.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he mumbled, moving even closer to Louis (if that was possible). Louis looked at him questioningly, delightfully beautiful, and Harry couldn’t stop himself any more.

“Here,” he said, putting his hands on Louis’ back. Louis cooperated almost instantaneously, as if this was what he had been expecting all along, and turned away from Harry to face the window. The DVD player lay forgotten in the magazine rack, abandoned in favour of conversation.

“See, you put your thumbs here,” Harry narrated, rubbing his thumbs in a circular motion along Louis’ shoulders. “It releases all of the tension.”

“How do you know so much about massages?” Louis asked. Harry could see his smirk in the reflection off the window. He could also see the flight attendant’s illuminated sign. She was one person who _would_ die in a plane crash, five months from now.

“Dunno,” Harry said, shrugging. “Just something I’ve picked up.”

“You’re unendingly surprising in your talents,” Louis said, and it sounded like a compliment, so Harry took it as one. He moved his hands from the interior of Louis’ shoulders, near the spine, towards the outside in a tandem motion, as if there was a mirror in the middle of his back. It felt amazing to be touching Louis, even innocently as this was, little sparks flowing between them. He was bound to feel it too, Harry thought, as he compared the size of his hands to the smallness of Louis’ torso.

He proceeded up and down his shoulder blades with his thumbs, not quite sure of his pain tolerance. “Is this okay?” he asked, looking over Louis’ shoulder. “Is it too hard or soft?”

“Getting harder,” Louis mumbled cheekily. Stupidly, Harry blushed. “No, really, it’s fine. You’ve got very good hands, young Harold.”

“I told you,” he said. A large lump had formed in his throat, causing his words to come out thick and sticky. “I’m just Harry.”

“You’re Harold to me,” Louis muttered back.

You’re everything to me, Harry thought, but he didn’t dare say.

“You know, this would be easier if you were lying down,” Harry mumbled, his cheeks still flaming. Louis turned around slightly to look at him. His side profile was exquisite.

“Remind me about that when we land,” he replied. “We can spend the night doing this. Actually, let’s spend the entire two weeks doing this. Screw the other ones.”

Harry laughed lowly. He moved his hands down Louis’ back, trying to stop his eyes from drifting down to his ass which was perfectly within reach and well supported in his jeans. “I like the sound of that,” he murmured, going red once again when he realised how deep his voice was getting.

Louis opened his mouth to speak, but at the exact same time Eleanor turned around, smiling from ear to ear. When her eyes rested on their entwined forms, her mouth dropped slightly open and she hurriedly turned away, but it was too late. The mood was broken.

The boys moved away from each other, slowly, hesitantly, as if they never wanted to leave. And, after a cursory apologetic glance at Harry, Louis called Eleanor back, saying that it was safe.

It turned out that all she wanted to talk about was the watch that Liam had just bought Sophia, as if it was the news of the century and completely unexpected.

A large, uncomfortable feeling settled in the pit of Harry’s stomach, but he shrugged it off. It was probably nothing.

Right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading! The next chapter will be exclusively their trip to Ireland, and I hope you'll all enjoy it! Thank you for your kind comments, kudos and subscriptions, they all mean so much! I hope to update very soon again. xx


	6. Chapter 6

Ireland was much _wetter_ than England anyways, in every definition of the word. The soil squelched more underneath his brown boots, the streets seemed to be built out of puddles and the drains on the side of the road were overflowing. The smell of rain hung thickly in the air, pressing down on Harry’s shoulders, but Ireland smelt fresher. It was easier to breathe there than it was in London, even if it was just psychological.

Niall was beaming from ear to ear. He blended into the landscape so seamlessly in the way that Zayn usually did with his surroundings. There weren’t many differences between Ireland and England weather wise, but it was infinitely polarised in Niall’s mind, and didn’t the rest of them know it. As they stepped out onto the metal staircase leading down from the plane, Louis’ hand once again hovering just above Harry’s waist in case of him falling, Niall had delivered at least ten remarks about the beauty of Ireland before they even touched ground. His enthusiasm was never-ending and, in Harry’s tired opinion, exhausting.

It was only ten o’clock in the morning, but already Harry was quite miserable. In fact, if Louis hadn’t have been there, he might just have collapsed onto the tarmac on which the plane had landed and fallen asleep, refusing to get up unless Liam agreed to carry him. There was a soft drizzle hazing the air, making the sky a light, cloud filled grey. Even the country was as depressed as Harry.

“Is anyone else tired, or is it just me?” he asked, but the question fell on deaf ears. His voice was somewhat drowned out by the sound of planes landing around them and the scuffling of the airport managers, and so only Louis, who was directly beside him, could pick him up.

“If you want,” he shouted back over the ruckus. “I’ll stay in with you tonight?”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Harry responded, although there was nothing else in the world he wanted more at that moment than to check into the hotel and fall asleep beside Louis. “They’re all going to the pubs tonight.”

“I’m sure they’re not all that different than London pubs,” Louis mumbled in his ear. They were inside of the airport terminal now, and so he could return to hushed tones, just in case Niall heard him saying such things and went off in an impassioned speech. “Besides, I’ve never been to Ireland. I want to experience Dublin sober, you know? We could go back, take a nap and then go out tonight, just you and me.”

Just you and me were Harry’s new favourite words. He smiled over at his best friend, feeling the all-too-familiar rush of affection he usually experienced in his company come flooding back with a vengeance, this time in a whole new country. “That sounds amazing,” he said, not able to conceal his grin. “But only if you’re sure.”

Louis leaned against Harry’s side and wrapped his arm around his waist so that it was hanging loosely around him as they walked. “What else would I rather do?” he asked, fondness dripping off his syllables. “Tearing the Irish main city apart with my favourite boy in the world? Sounds like perfection to me.”

Harry wanted to say, ‘But I’m not really your favourite boy, you already have one’, but he was scared that to do so would cause Louis to retract his previous statement. It was sometimes better to have a lie than a painful truth, especially when Louis was concerned. He settled on, “Well I’m flattered” and a squeeze of Louis’ upper arm to portray his thankfulness.

“I love you, Louis,” Harry said. Somehow, the airport seemed so much smaller in Ireland than it had in London. Yet again, he found himself wishing for more time.  
Louis grinned at him and pulled him tighter into his side.

“I love you too, baby,” he responded. Harry scrunched his eyebrows together in frustration.

“No, I mean I really love you,” Harry protested. Louis let out a laugh. They were at the doors now and their taxi was waiting past the glass, its wipers moving in the rain.

“I really love you too, mate,” Louis repeated, still grinning, still not understanding. He opened the door to the car and let Harry in first before squeezing in himself.

Perhaps, Harry thought as the rest of their friends piled into the taxi and the other one directly behind it, it would’ve been better to tell Louis he was in love with him, rather than just love. You can love a fish. You can love the pizza delivery man. But you can only be in love with one person, and that was what made it so spectacular. The unfortunate thing was that Harry wasn’t Louis’ person, even if he was his favourite.

“When we get back to my hometown,” Niall said from the front seat beside the driver. “Little Theo’s baptism is in a week, so Mum will be yapping on at you about suit sizes. Just warning in advance.”

“Mrs Horan can be _very_ scary when she wants to be,” Harry said, thinking back to their last visit. Harry had singlehandedly destroyed a prized family heirloom during his spontaneous dance routine. Long story short, due to his jazz hands and unending enthusiasm, there was no longer a small statue based on the likeness of Niall’s great-great grandmother in existence. “We’ll have to get the same tie obviously.”

This was another thing, a reference to a crappily written sitcom in which the men made fun of their suits for a wedding, which were all the same. They had made various bad puns about how they looked like a boy-band or a barber shop quartet but Louis had found it decidedly hilarious and Harry loved his smile, so it was inscribed in his memory.  
“Oh yes,” Louis grinned. “My lifetime dream has been to wear cheesy matching ties with a beautiful boy.”

Niall, who had obviously understood that it was an inside joke, had returned his attention to discussing in rapid speech the Irish news.

“Cheese never hurt anyone,” Harry said wisely. “Except the lactose intolerant.”

Louis stopped grinning and considered him for a moment before bursting out into beautiful, spontaneous, confident laughter.

“You’re such a dork!” he declared, nudging Harry in the arm playfully. Harry smiled back at him and grasped onto his fingers, stopping him from reclaiming his hand.

“I’m your dork though,” he responded as Louis tried desperately to wiggle from his grasp. _Even if you’re not mine._

“There it is,” Niall chimed from the front seat. Harry went to drop Louis’ hand, but, strangely, their fingers remained slightly entwined, the soft skin of their palms resting against each other. “Dublin! God I love Ireland.”

The city came into view in all of its glory; big and brick and beautiful. Harry took a brief moment to consider the wonder of it all, the philosophy, that humans could build and build and build things that were bigger than themselves, bigger than their descendents and their ancestors, bigger than all human beings put together. Yet, they put their trust in these creations. They lived in them, believing that they were safe, that they would never hurt them, even though they have the possibility to do so. He supposed the same was true of humans.

“It’s beautiful,” Louis mused, and Harry agreed, but he was only half looking at Dublin.

*

Louis kept true to his word. That night, whilst Eleanor and Sophia painted each other’s faces with expensive makeup and Zayn reluctantly assisted Liam in choosing appropriate clothing, Louis sat with Harry on the bed, watching their bustling friends as they got ready, providing comments as they went.

“Oh, I like that shirt,” he said. Zayn was holding a plaid button-up against Liam’s chest, looking decidedly uncomfortable (whether it was at the idea of going out drinking or because of their close proximity, Harry couldn’t tell). “It makes your shoulders look all wide, like Captain America. Very sexy.”

This boy was a symphony; all violins and choruses that made Harry’s heart wrench with their every movement. Liam smiled sheepishly and gently took the clothing from Zayn’s long fingers. “Well, if Louis likes it, it must be good,” he said, never once looking the dark-haired boy in the eyes. Louis nodded, smiling, either not noticing the obvious tension or choosing to overlook it.

Sophia let out a triumphant sound and moved back from the vanity set, framing Eleanor’s made-up face with her hands. Harry thought that she was beautiful before, but she was ravishing now. Her eyes were perfectly shadowed, her lips red and full, her hair hanging in loose curls over her shoulder. He could see the appeal in Eleanor as a girlfriend, and he knew without looking that Niall was probably salivating at that very moment.

They had decided upon rooms earlier that day. Louis and Harry were obvious roommates, then Zayn and Liam (neither of them particularly happy with the development) and Sophia and Eleanor together. Niall was going to stay with one of his old mates who had come to Dublin specifically to meet with him.

“I wonder if Tommy’s changed,” Niall mused, pulling his tie into place. He was wearing a short sleeved denim shirt and a pair of black jeans, an outfit that Harry would usually associate with a 90’s disco. “He’s been living in Thailand the past couple of years windsurfing and all. He’s a bit of an adrenalin junkie.”

Harry had met Tommy Rogers a couple of times before. Niall basically idolised him as the epitome of spontaneity, but little did he know his childhood best friend would die at thirty-three from a mountain climbing incident.

“He sounds fun,” Louis provided, pulling his knees up to his chest to get more comfortable on the bed. He was still dressed the same as he had been during the flight, the purple sweater pulling delightfully at the seams with his movements.

“He is,” Liam agreed, re-entering the room. He’d gone into the bathroom to change and was now almost ready. “He’s really down to earth too. I like him.”

“Well he’s coming along tonight for a while, I think,” Niall said excitedly. “His plane lands in ten minutes.”

Harry looked over at Louis, who was looking significantly interested in Tommy, definitely enough so to dump a night-in in favour of partying with him. “You can go, if you want,” he said. His head was throbbing and his heart was screaming for him to shut up, but he couldn’t do it. “I don’t mind chilling here.”

Louis didn’t even stop to think before shaking his head. “Harry, I’ve made my decision. We are going torment every damn person in this hotel sober and fully aware of our actions. We’ll actually be able to tell stories about what we did, rather than guessing from our friends’ descriptions.”

He had such a way of explaining things that made them sound infinitely more appealing than the alternative. It was a gift.

“I think I might stay in tonight too,” said Zayn contemplatively. He still wasn’t dressed and had been displaying waves of uneasy at the prospect of an Irish pub with Niall’s daredevil mate throughout the getting ready. “And go to bed.”

By this point, Louis and Harry had already had a nap. They had retired to their bedroom almost immediately after checking in whilst the rest of their friends went to get some dinner from the hotel buffet. They’d lain in their alternative beds for a few minutes before Louis’ voice crept through the still-bright air of the hotel room. “Hazza?”

“Yes Lou?”

“It’s pretty cold in here.”

“Is it?” He hadn’t noticed. He almost always had goosebumps around Louis anyways.

“Yeah,” Louis muttered, almost incoherently. “I think we better snuggle. For heat purposes only, of course.”

“Well, friends don’t let friends freeze,” Harry mused, pretending that he was thinking about the suggestion so as not to portray the obvious truth; he had known the answer before Louis had even asked. He opened his arms and Louis scuttled across the floor, grasping a pillow in his small hands.

It was a twin room, so they only had the space of a single bed to house the both of them. They squeezed up tightly beside each other so that they were lying like soldiers, their hands down by their sides. It felt odd to lie in a bed with Louis, but not in an uncomfortable way; more like it felt like they should be doing something else.

“Well I don’t feel any warmer,” Louis murmured, turning his face around to glance at Harry. Harry did the same, and they were relaxing there, looking into each other’s eyes, their lips mere inches away from each other. Harry swallowed, hoping that the thickness in his throat would disappear as quickly as it had come. After all, they weren’t doing anything wrong, right?

“What do you want me to do?” Harry asked hesitantly, feeling distinctly sheepish that he was being this timid, this distrustful of his own actions. Louis smiled at him and placed their hands together.

“There’s a start,” he said, turning away once again, his eyes fluttering closed contently.

“What about Mark?” he questioned, wishing that for once he could see even deeper into Louis than the instant he would die (eight months, ten days and counting). “What would he think about this?”

“Who gives a fuck about Mark?” came the response. Harry shuffled on the bed. His thumb seemed to be determined to move independently of his body, and it was stroking the back of Louis’ hand in tandem motions.

“Well,” he had begun. “You do, don’t you?”

Louis grunted. “Yeah, but maybe I shouldn’t anymore.”

This time, Harry bit his tongue.

He woke up an hour and a half later with Louis’ back pressed against his chest, spooning if friends could spoon (Harry had always considered it a very _couplely_ thing, but perhaps he was wrong). He lay there, looking over Louis’ shoulder at the way his eyelashes fluttered as he slept, and then got up, thinking that Louis would be taken over by wracking guilt if he saw the way they had been entwined.

“Oh come on, Zayn,” Niall said, pulling on the boy’s arm. “You _need_ to come out. You’ve been a mope since Perrie dumped you, and I’ve got this old friend who would be perfect for you, you should see the tits on her...”

“Strangely,” Harry piped up as Louis held back laughter. “Zayn seems the type of guy to care about more than boobs, Ni.”

“Well yeah,” Niall said, looking unabashed as the room dissolved into laughter. “I mean, she’s hilarious and smart and all, but she’s got...”

“We get the point Niall,” Liam said, frowning slightly. He walked over to Sophia and linked arms with her. “Are we all ready then?”

Zayn looked down at the informal t-shirt and jeans he was wearing. “Yeah we’re all good,” he said shrugging.

“You look like a Vogue model anyways,” Sophia provided kindly, and Zayn mumbled a thank you. Harry supposed that was the closest to communication they were ever going to get between the two.

Niall thrust his fist up in the air and let out a loud yelp. “Dublin, here we come!”

Eleanor laughed and Sophia did the same, whilst Liam just shook his head. A few moments later and Louis and Harry were completely alone in the room, left only with a couple empty cans of hairspray and various Axe products.

Louis turned around to look at Harry. “About that talk...”

“Oh God,” Harry mused. Louis let out a light laugh.

“It’s nothing bad, I swear. I just need to ask some advice about something, that’s all.”

Harry felt himself relax almost automatically. He thought about his previous promise to himself to never again lie to Louis Tomlinson, so therefore he was glad that he hadn’t asked about his ‘talent’. “Hit me with it,” he said.

Louis exhaled deeply and then began. “Me and Mark have been arguing lately...”

‘I’ve noticed,’ Harry thought. ‘You’ve come crying to me several times over that jackass, but I’m not going to say that because I’m a loser that’s too afraid to lose you.’

“And you’ve really helped me through it, you know that,” he said.

“I wasn’t aware it was over,” Harry said, thinking of the use of the word ‘through’ and feeling distaste bubble in his stomach. Louis fumbled for a few seconds and then regained his composure.

“It’s not,” Louis admitted. “But you’ve helped me, Harry, a lot. And I’ve never bothered to tell you what’s actually going on.”

“I don’t need to know to help you,” Harry said, and for the first time on the trip since the ‘I love you’ he was telling Louis the complete truth.

“But I want to tell you!” Louis protested. There was water in the corner of his eyes, as there usually was nowadays when he spoke of Mark. “He’s... He’s done something bad.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Harry muttered, feeling decidedly light-headed. “You make me feel sick.”

“Why do you care so much about me?”

“Why don’t you care enough?”

“He cheated on me again.”

There it was; Harry’s opportunity to comfort Louis and ultimately vie for his affections whilst he was broken up, miserable and vulnerable. It was a chance that many wouldn’t dare to pass up for fear of it never returning, but unfortunately Harry was a good person, or at least he wanted to be, and so he couldn’t allow himself to take advantage of the situation. He decided to choose his words very carefully.

“Louis,” was all that could make its way past his lips, the only word that seemed to be completely safe. Unfortunately, it just made Louis cry harder, which made Harry want to comfort him, which led to his arms around the smaller boy’s waist and tears soaking his white t-shirt. Fuck, he was so far gone. “Louis.”

“I told him the last time,” he sobbed pathetically, his nose running. Harry pulled a tissue out of the box beside his bed, stretching so that he didn’t have to lose physical contact with the boy for a second. It felt, in many ways, that his touch was all that was holding Louis together. “I told him the last time that if he did it again, I’d be gone. So why couldn’t I leave?”

“Fuck,” Harry muttered. “I don’t know, Lou, but you have to listen to me, okay? You have to listen to me.”

Harry grasped onto the upper of Louis’ arms, ignoring when he grunted in frustration as their bodies pulled apart.

“You are perfection,” Harry said, suddenly knowing exactly what to say. “You are the sunshine at the end of a long day, you’re the plane landing after a long way, hell you’re the reason the goddamn sun shines in the morning! It’s all for you Lou, it’s all for you, and you just need to know that to understand that you’re so much better than that asshole. You deserve the world and more, you deserve someone who would move _mountains_ for you, who appreciates what they have right in front of them, who knows how lucky they are to have you, you understand me? You’re so fucking amazing, Louis, there isn’t enough hours in this trip to sit here and explain all the things that are fantastic about you. Don’t let him make you feel like you’re nothing, because you’re everything, you get me?”

There was a brief period of silence in which all that could be heard was the sniffling of Louis’ nose and the doors slamming in the corridor outside as the maids bustled around cleaning. Blue never left green, and green didn’t dare to look away, so they just stayed like that, the corners of Louis’ mouth twitching, his face covered in sticky tears.

“You think so much of me Harry,” Louis said finally, his voice warbled with liquid, looking nothing like the boy Harry so inspired to be like but everything like the boy he was determined to protect. “I lo... I wish I was more like you.”

“You are though,” Harry protested, feeling slightly agitated that he was missing the entire point. “You are better than me, Lou, for God’s sake.”

“Stop it,” Louis muttered, pressing his face into Harry’s shirt. “I didn’t room with you to get a lecture.”

“You asked me for my fucking advice!”

“And what is it?” he asked, muffled by the fabric so Harry had to listen even more intently to make out words. “That I should leave him, is that it? ‘Cause I’ve tried, Harry, fuck I’ve tried.”

Harry looked at him for a second, and then sighed against his hair. His lips pressed against Louis’ scalp, and this time, he kissed the skin. Louis didn’t freeze in his arms as he had expected him to, instead he snuggled even further into Harry’s chest so that he could feel his soft breath through the thinness of his t-shirt.

“I think we need alcohol,” Harry muttered. Louis laughed against him, his entire body shaking with suppressed giggles. He was adorable.

“It’ll just make things worse,” Louis mumbled. “What is that you always say? Alcohol’s a...”

“Depressant,” Harry finished, smiling at his friend. Louis nodded contentedly and then pulled away from the embrace so he could look Harry in the eyes.

“I think I’m the depressant tonight,” he said. Harry chuckled lowly while shaking his head.

“Nothing you could do would make me sad,” he said. “Except for dumping me as a friend, and you’d never do that, right?”

“Don’t think I could live a day without you,” Louis admitted, a slight tinge to his cheeks. “Is that weird?”

Harry shook his head. “Well, I feel the same, so we’re both weirdoes together then.”

“Do you want to get out of here?” Louis asked suddenly.

“Like, out of this room or out of the country?”

“Out of the room, smartass. Let’s go to Phoenix Park, or the zoo or something and feel alive as we run through the grass naked.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to see you naked,” Harry said, and then, realising what he had just said, spoke quickly afterwards to try a vain attempt at cover up. “That sounds great, I mean it’s all spontaneous and shit and that’s what holidays are about, right, doing things that you’d never do at home? And I like getting naked.”

Louis raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. “I’ll have you know I’m fantabulous naked,” he teased as they made their way for the front door, Harry pulling on his boots again as they went.

“Don’t doubt that,” he muttered, watching Louis walk down the hall, calling out a greeting to the maids without a hint of what had just transpired upon his face.

Phoenix Park was the largest park in all of Ireland, at least according to the snippets of information Niall had provided that Harry could be bothered remembering. It was also the house of the zoo, and apparently you could spend forever and a day in it and not get bored. Harry hoped for Louis’ sake that this was true. They had arrived there relatively quickly, it being only a few minutes away by taxi, and Louis had visibly relaxed the second they walked past the gates.

“It’s beautiful here,” Louis said, resting his elbows against a painted green iron fence that lined the river banks. There were clusters of different coloured flowers amongst the bright green grass, creating a rainbow of nature that stretched on for as far as Harry could see without binoculars. “It’s the type of place that makes you feel like you’re meant to be here, you know?”

Harry understood, but that wasn’t why he was enjoying it. It was the pure solitude of the park that was the main selling point for him, meaning that he didn’t have to see an endless stream of deaths spelling themselves out across the water.

He moved over to stand near Louis, as close as he dared - their hips were barely touching – and considered the squirrels scampering amongst the foliage on the other side of the water. It was still very much summer, so the sun was shining brightly over Dublin, only slightly orange at the edges. Birds twittered in the treetops above their heads, singing out their beautifully entwined choruses.

“Mark wouldn’t get it,” Louis mused. Harry wondered briefly if he should’ve thought of something more interesting to do than walk around a park (he could’ve orchestrated The Hangover style antics with a little bit of notice) but after seeing the calmness that displayed itself over the other boy’s features he decided that maybe this was the perfect place to be after all. “He’d be complaining about the silence. He has to talk all the time, you know? As if we can’t spend time together being quiet. It’s different with you.”  
“Different,” Harry repeated, remembering his previous question quite suddenly. “In what way different?”

Harry thought that, in his old age when he began forgetting, one of the poignant moments in which he would remember would be this one, and the way in which Louis’ eyes sparkled as he talked of _Harry_. There was a faint smile tugging on his lips, and Harry wondered if it had been this way for a while and he hadn’t noticed. He was a topic that required grinning for Louis. Wow.

“You’re...” Louis paused, letting a little laugh pass from his lips as he looked downwards into the spiralling water, which was breaking with each faint raindrop that hit against it. “You’re like Paris, you know? All rich and wise and romantic and beautiful.”

Take your time Harry, he reminded himself. You don’t want to mess this up.

“And what are your thoughts on Paris?” he asked questioningly, smiling as he did so despite the forceful flopping of his stomach.

Louis turned his attentions from the gorgeousness of the creator’s masterpieces, resting his eyes upon Harry’s own.

“I’d spend all my life there if I had the chance.”

In that moment, Harry was a piece of paper and Louis was the wind.

*

They spent seven hours in Phoenix Park before returning to the hotel in which they fell asleep pressed against each other’s sides, breathing in the scent of each other as if it was the oxygen they craved. The time to leave the capital city and return to Mullingar came swiftly, and the days in which they spent in the Horan household blurred into two continuous weeks, broken apart only by Theo’s christening.

He would die, the baby, of a car crash on his fortieth birthday. Harry, looking down onto the blue eyes and the innocence, at the way every person in the family loved him so devotedly without even knowing him, considered advising Niall to forbid Theo from going out until the devastating blow came. Niall would be dead and gone by the time Theo was forty.

Harry settled for writing a note to his honorary nephew, which he shoved inside a photo album containing pictures of Niall and Harry throughout the years. “Give it to him on the morning of his fortieth birthday, okay?” Harry said to Mrs Horan, who would be alive well into her nineties. She raised her eyebrow, but Harry bluffed by saying, “It has a special message for him then from his Uncle Harry. Just promise.” Eventually the blonde haired woman nodded, appearing significantly confused, not that Harry blamed her, but he’d done his work.

He peered at himself in the church mirror. Another six years and six months gone. It had worked. Apparently that was the price for telling someone of his talent.

Louis had spent more and more time in Harry’s company, every moment the two of them melding closer and closer together. They rarely ever went out, and when they did it was to various spots of natural beauty or little eateries unlike anything in England. They were making memories, and Louis refused alcohol because he said he wanted to remember every moment. It remained that way until the second to last day of the trip.

They had been walking out from Wee Paddy’s, one of their new favourite restaurants, when Louis got a text message on his phone. It was pouring with rain and Harry could barely hear him amongst the whipping wind, but he got the gist. Mark had dumped him, as unceremoniously as those four words.

Harry had expected to feel some sort of sick sense of victory at the news that would ultimately come, but he didn’t. He just looked at Louis, as obviously shocked as he was, the world crumbling around with the sight of Louis’ face falling, the remnants of the smile he had been wearing disappearing as if it had never been there after all.

Of course, Harry followed Louis as he stormed back into the bar and demanded they hand over as many bottles of vodka as they had. Thankfully the bartender was on Harry’s side and only provided them with two, saying that the tea time rush had drunk the majority. And so they stumbled back to the hotel, Louis drinking the remainder of his Jack Daniel’s and blubbing, Harry supporting almost all of his weight on his right hip.

It was dark in the room, but Louis refused to let him put on the lights. “What’s the point?” he hiccupped, slamming the vodka down beside the Coke bottle. They were alone in the house; Mr and Mrs Horan were out on a date and the rest of their friends were out partying as usual, but for once Harry wished he wasn’t the only one with Louis.

Everything dissolved quite neatly, Harry thought, and his morals went somewhere along with Louis mumbling all he had dreamed about in his ear without letting his lips ever touch skin. They were bare chested within half an hour, covered in vodka because Louis had decided upon the grand idea of drinking spirits from each other’s bellybuttons.

“It looked fun in the movies,” Louis slurred, and Harry didn’t have the strength to push him away. He had already rejected his kiss more times than he dared, and to say no one more time would finish him off properly. He was standing on a great precipice, one step from falling off the edge, and Louis was chipping away at the stone underneath his feet.

“It’s fun right now,” Harry muttered, his breath hitching in his chest as Louis’ tongue licked against his naval. His throat was closing over, his vision blurring as he focused on Louis’ mouth, which inched closer and closer to the waistband of his trousers, moving expertly along the band of his Calvin Kleins.

“Lou...” he said, putting his hands in Louis’ hair and pulling slightly. Louis looked upwards, his irises dilated and hungry. “Lou, we’re just... Lou, stop it.”

Perhaps it was the fact that he obeyed Harry’s request or the ghost of Louis’ lips against his skin, but suddenly Harry found the insane desire to get wasted.

When Niall returned and burst into the room to boast of his latest conquest, he found them giggling, delirious and entwined together, laughing into each other’s necks.

“Hey!” Louis hiccoughed. “It’s tha Ni guy! He ded on, ya no tha Haz?”

“Nope,” Harry popped the ‘p’, causing both boys to descend into fits of insatiable laughter, their ribs aching from the humour. Niall shook his head and backed out of the room, muttering something incoherent about the ‘beauty’ of vodka, and Louis just leaned in closely to Harry’s ear.

“Ya no wha I tink?” he whispered loudly, chuckling in between each word. “I tink we r ver, ver drunk righ’ now.”

“Ya tink?” Harry tittered.

His only drunken thought was that Mark might’ve been perfect, but that was only because he had Louis beside him. He was never going to let him hurt his boy again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one took a bit more work to get it right because I was in one of those moods where I had to remind myself to stay focused! Hopefully this is alright though, and I hope to get the next few chapters up soon. Thank you again to everybody who has left kudos or comments, it means so much to me! :)


	7. Chapter 7

Eight months later, and Harry Styles had known Louis Tomlinson for only eleven months, but it felt just a bit like forever.

He was chewing on a piece of strawberry chewing gum and watching Louis get ready for work on an April morning. It had raining for the entire month, or at least that’s what it felt like, but that day was bright, sunny and airy, reminding him of that day they spent in the Irish park lying upon the grass and talking about the distance of the stars.

Nothing had happened between them. Louis and Mark got back together in October, and then Louis broke up with him in December. He told Harry that his excuse for the relationship ending was that he’d met somebody else. When Harry asked if it was true, Louis didn’t answer. It was infuriating knowing that he was available now and he still couldn’t bring himself to kiss him full on his mouth.

Harry was a coward.

In exactly three and a half weeks, there would come a night (dark, clouds covering the moon, Harry supposed) in which Louis would feel the urge to get in the car and go to the shop to get some M&Ms. He would be planning to return to Harry’s apartment, which was rapidly becoming his second address, and split the packet with his best friend, chucking the red ones into Harry’s mouth because they were his favourite. But if Harry failed in persuading Louis to stay with him, he’d be gone forever, untouchable in death.

“You should come to work with me today,” Louis said, smiling as he pulled on the trousers that Harry thought perfectly accented the contours of his ass. “I’ve already asked Maria about it, and she said it would be fine.”

Maria was Louis’ boss, and she’d already met Harry on multiple occasions when he picked Louis up from work. There was no conceivable reason that he should ferry the older boy around – he was perfectly capable of driving and had his own car sitting outside his apartment block – but it at least provided Harry with the opportunity to touch Louis’ thigh every day. He wasn’t sure when the slightly possessive action had started to be carried out, but he knew that Louis always stroked the back of his hand with his thumb when he did so, so it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Maria was convinced – as well as Niall, Liam, Zayn and pretty much everyone else on campus – that _HarryandLouis_ was a definite thing, kept from public knowledge only for the excitement of secrecy. The amount of times Harry had to say, “No, we’re just friends” over the past months couldn’t be counted on five hands never mind two, but Louis definitely wasn’t picking up the slack. In fact, he just grinned away at whoever had cooed over their cuteness and grasped onto the hem of Harry’s shirt. Sometimes he even threw in an, “I know, he’s adorable, isn’t he?” for good measure. That bastard.

Harry supposed that in every sense of the word ‘relationship’ he and Louis were in one (apart from the kissing and the sex). They touched at every opportune moment, blushed like mad when one of them complimented the other, held hands, fell asleep beside each other and cuddled together whilst they watched movies... In fact, Harry wasn’t exactly sure what _was_ preventing him from asking Louis out. Perhaps it was because he had always been the more dominant, outspoken one of the duo and Harry had never asked anyone out before. Or perhaps it was just fate taking the piss.

“Yeah?” Harry said, smiling. Louis pulled the shirt down over his head, messing up his feathery brown hair. Harry stood up from the bed to fix his collar and hair, making it sit perfectly against his forehead. “What made you so sure I was going to agree?”

Louis grinned at him cheekily, a glint in his eye that made Harry want nothing more than to kiss him, long and deep until they ran out of air. “It’s me and kids,” he said. “Two of your favourite things, am I right?”

Harry nodded and looked at him fondly, pressing his lips against the middle of Louis’ forehead. “You’re always right,” he said against his skin as Louis grinned triumphantly. “That’s one of the things I love most about you.”

“Do you actually love me though?” Louis asked, looking up into his eyes with his beautifully azure irises. “You _say_ you do, but then...”

“What?” Harry mumbled. “What’s wrong honey?”

He had the sort of look in his eyes that made Harry think he knew something he didn’t. Of course, Louis always knew things Harry didn’t; it was his thing, to appear as if he was consistently outsmarting the rest of the world.

“I never know if I’m important to you,” he muttered, and when Harry began to protest he pressed his finger to his lips. “Shush for one second Harry, God. I mean like... _important_ important. You always look at everyone like they’re gold. How am I any different?”

“Is different our favourite word or something?” Harry laughed, brushing his lips against Louis’ finger when he pulled it away. “We always want to be different to each other.”

“No,” Louis said, shaking his head. “We want to be everything to each other.”

“Well,” Harry said. “Aren’t we that already?”

Louis pondered over this for a moment, only answering with a smirk when Harry playfully hit him in the arm. “Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket, dear Harold. You saw what happened the last time I did that.”

“If you compare me to Mark,” Harry warned, rolling his eyes. “I will have no problem throwing you off Big Ben, you know that.”

They were outside of the apartment now and Harry was fumbling around in his pocket for the keys to lock the door. Louis found them first in his back pocket and moved with the swiftness that only came from an action performed hundreds of times before, closing the door of the flat tightly.

“I’ve actually never been to Big Ben,” he admitted. Harry pressed the button on the elevator and rested his shoulder against the wall, looking at Louis with careful amusement.  
“How can you live in London and not have visited the biggest tourist attraction here?” he asked, disbelieving. Louis shrugged his shoulders and moved into the lift, settling against the wall beside a little old couple. Harry mirrored his actions.

“Maybe that’s why,” Louis said, crossing his arms against his chest. “I’m not really one for cliché, dear Harry.”

“I never asked you to be,” Harry said. “I’m just saying that London’s full of amazing places to go...”

“And I haven’t been to any of them.”

“London Dungeons?”

“Nope.”

“The Eye?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Westfield’s?”

“Well that’s hardly a tourist attraction, is it? It’s just a shopping centre the size of a small country.”

“You make a good point.”

There was a brief interlude of silence in which Harry just admired Louis, who remained blissfully oblivious, focusing on the doors of the elevator and when they would open.

He felt an insatiable need to write a song about the beauty of this boy. He was paradise, the flashing of lights against the Vegas sky, the goodnight after a really good date when neither of you want to leave. He was comfort and he was lack of breath; he was the brightest light in the vicinity and Harry was nothing but a humble moth. He was the sun, yes, but he was also the moon and the stars and the planets all combined into one gorgeous monopoly. Harry found himself disbelieving in any reality apart from the one that lived behind his eyes.

“Maybe you can bring me there someday,” Louis suggested. “We can make a little outing of it.”

“When do you get off work?” he asked, determined to spend every second with Louis, just in case. “We could do it tonight.”

“It’ll be late.”

“When has that ever mattered to you?”

Louis smiled at him, all glistening white teeth and slight dimples forming in his cheeks, all tan and wonder and purple veins. “Well then,” he said happily. “It’s a date.”

Before he could say anything else, the ping of the lift went off and Louis bounced out of the elevator, smiling as he went. He must’ve expected Harry to follow immediately because he scuttled ahead, grinning at those milling around the lobby. Instead, Harry stood for a moment taking in every line of his body and how they moved in those trousers, considering how such a massive personality could fit in his tiny frame.

The old woman of the couple touched his hand gently as she walked past with her husband. She had a kind face, and the corners of her mouth were turned upwards in a comforting expression. She reminded Harry of his grandmother.

“You love him, don’t you?” she said. A little bit shocked but not wanting to disagree, he nodded.

“He’s my best friend,” Harry explained. The little woman (Harry recognised her now as Mabel who lived four doors down and gave Zayn her old newspapers for his various art projects. She would die in ten years) shook her head, not satisfied.

“No,” she said. Her husband (Roger?) looked slightly embarrassed and made a gesture for her to hurry out, but Mabel ignored him. “You love him.”

Harry thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he admitted finally. “I love him.”

“I could tell,” she said, tapping the side of her nose. “It’s in the look. You should tell him. A good looking boy like that’ll get snapped up quick if you’re not careful.”

A laugh escaped Harry’s lips. “I wish I could,” he said. “I’ve never found the right time.”

“Just kiss him,” Roger piped up from behind, resting a careful, wrinkled hand on his wife’s shoulder. “What I did with Mabel. I wasn’t really good with words, but I knew how to kiss.”

“Do it today,” Mabel ordered, sounding very authoritive for such a frail looking woman. “You never know what could happen. If he was gone tomorrow, what would you regret not saying?”

Now, Harry knew that Louis wasn’t going to be gone tomorrow, but regardless Mabel’s words got through to him. He grinned at the couple and thanked them sincerely. “I’ll try my best,” he promised, beginning to run after his friend.

“I expect to get an invite to the wedding!” Mabel called after him. He threw her a wink and a thumbs up and caught up with Louis who automatically pulled him into his side and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“Who was that? And who’s getting married?” Louis asked inquisitively.

“Just my neighbour,” Harry answered. “And ours, babe, who else’s?”

Louis laughed into his side, tapping him fondly on the nose. “Fair enough.”

He took it as a joke, but that was okay, because Harry hadn’t lied.

*

Harry held his hands up in front of the little girl, Robyn, as she pushed her paintbrush coated in purple between his fingers. She was giving him ‘gloves’, she said, whilst her little friend Bailey circled Harry who was dressed in a rather large pair of denim overalls. “Watch out for Billy,” Louis had warned beforehand. “He _will_ throw paint at your face, and it’s pretty damn hard to get out of your hair.”

This seemed like the perfect job, Harry thought. It was much better than serving food he barely understood the ingredients of to uncaring patrons in his sister’s now-fiancé’s restaurant. The wedding was to take place in six months, and if all went well, Harry was hopefully going to ask Louis as his date. He’d probably chicken out though, and constantly live in a state of panic.

Louis had stood at the front of the Kids Club, wedged in between stacks of books and tiny, toy keyboards, and introduced Harry with jazz hands as his ‘special friend’. “Harry’s going to be helping me out today,” he explained to the mass of eager, waiting faces. “So I want you all to treat him very nice, okay, because he’s a very nice person.”

“You’re not so bad yourself, Tomlinson,” Harry had muttered once the children dispersed, some of them moving towards Harry cautiously, teaming at his feet.

“Do you want to braid my hair?” Robyn asked, dropping her sopping paintbrush down onto a pile of scrapped newspaper. Harry smiled at her and nodded.

“Of course,” he said kindly. “I’d love to braid your hair. I just need to go and wash my hands, because, although I love my gloves, I don’t want the paint to get in your pretty blonde hair.”

Robyn nodded, understanding, and as Harry walked towards the sink he heard her and Bailey giggling incessantly behind his back. A couple of the girls had started the rumour that Harry was a prince from a fairytale book, and now it meant that they were all vying for his attention. Louis was standing beside the washing-up section with a little boy, placing a plaster on his head.

“He tripped over,” he explained to Harry, smoothing out the bandage on the wriggling boy’s head. “Didn’t you Troy?”

The little boy – Troy – nodded and started tapping his feet on the floor. “Can I go play now Louis?” he asked, basically halfway gone before Louis gave him a nod. He took off running, stumbling only slightly over the step of the back door, and pretty soon Harry could catch a glimpse of him outside climbing all over the slide with his friends. Everything was so simple with children, and that was exactly what Harry loved most about them.

Louis was washing his hands underneath the same tap as Harry was doing his, and he crinkled his eyes every time their fingers brushed against each other. “You seem to be doing well,” Louis muttered. They were little less than ten centimetres away from each other. Harry could smell the scent of paint off Louis’ own pair of dungarees, and the scent mingled with his minty breath. “You’ve already got a loyal following. You’re practically Jesus.”

Harry turned around slightly to see at least ten pairs of eyes watching them as they cleaned up. The children looked away quickly when Harry made eye contact, but pretty soon they were back to staring. “You’re really at home here,” he mentioned to Louis. He had noticed the softness on his features around the children, the way he acted out the voices in the books and how he had little special things for every child, like how with Troy he held onto his hands as he jumped off a tree stump, or with Rachel he helped her pin up her red hair.

“I have piles of little ones at home to take care of,” Louis reminded him. He had explained in snippets during drunken nights and sober mornings that this was precisely the reason he was attending university; in order to provide himself with the opportunity to help his family for the rest of their lives. When Harry said it wasn’t really his responsibility, he had refused to listen. He seemed to be more of a father to his sisters than a brother. “Would you like kids?”

“Absolutely,” Harry answered without hesitation. It had never been something that he had to consider. The idea that he would be a father one day had always seemed enticing to him. He often dreamed of what he would name his child, who their other father would be, what they would talk like.

Louis raised an eyebrow. “Even as young as you are?” he asked. Harry wasn’t sure if he was testing him, or whether he had a specific response in mind, but he decided to answer honestly.

“Even as young as I am,” he confirmed. A small smile gradually crept onto Louis’ handsome features, making his face light up and his eyes shine.

“Me too,” he said. “I’ve wanted kids since sixteen.”

“Same here,” Harry grinned. “I think I’d want a little girl, but a son would be good too.”

“I think two or three would be enough for me,” Louis said, drying his hands against his dungarees. Harry did the same, and they reluctantly began the walk back to the children. “I don’t want to have another hectic household like mine growing up, you know?”

“Two or three would be perfect for me too,” Harry said. Of course, he wasn’t surprised that their plans would entwine so perfectly; everything just seemed to work with Louis. “I better get back to Robyn. I promised to help her braid her hair.”

“You must’ve won her over,” Louis said, looking significantly impressed. “She doesn’t usually let me anywhere near her scrunchies.”

“Well, maybe I’m just more charismatic than you,” Harry teased. Louis laughed, bouncing his hip against Harry’s lightly.

“More quirky, perhaps,” he said. “You can wrap people around your little finger. Look at you, you’re adorable. Bailey’s pretty much planning her wedding right now.”

“She’s four years old!”

“Exactly,” Louis chuckled. “I’ll see you soon. Your humble subjects await.”

And, just like that, he was disappearing into the group of kids clamouring for his attention, each of them clasping a book in their grubby, tiny fingers for him to read to them. Harry watched them for a few seconds, imagining for even a brief second that they were his own children, him and Louis’ kids...

It was ridiculous that he was even thinking so far into the future. Louis was going to graduate in a couple of months, and then he’d be out of university whilst Harry still had another two years of a law degree to go. He wondered briefly how their relationship (if you could call it that) would change, but he wasn’t worried, not really. They were a thing. _HarryandLouis_ was untouchable.

“My little brother’s called Harry too,” Robyn informed him as he settled down in the seat behind her and started separating her tatted hair. He was trying to work delicately, moving his fingers expertly through the hair so as not to hurt her. Harry had a lot of practice when he was younger in braiding; Gemma had used him as her personal hairdresser. She said he was just gentle enough to make hair plaiting an enjoyable experience. “But he doesn’t look like a prince like you.”

Harry giggled – yes, he giggled – and began to the actual process, having found his way through the labyrinth of blonde on the little girl’s head. “Well thank you very much, Miss Robyn.”

“Where’s your horse?” she asked.

“Where did you get the idea I was a prince?” Harry asked delicately. Bailey was still hovering around, watching his hands moving around with odd intensity that only a child could be comfortable with.

Robyn shrugged, which at least made working with her hair even harder than it had been before. “Dunno,” she admitted. “Louis talked about you before. I thought you _sounded_ like a prince.”

He had to admit, he was flattered that Louis had discussed him with the children he spent so much time with, even if he didn’t exactly understand it. “Oh,” he said lamely. “Well, that explains it then, doesn’t it?”

“That’s why I said it,” Robyn said in a self satisfied voice.

After he was finished braiding Robyn’s hair, Harry was inundated with requests from her various friends. The entire five hours that Louis worked Harry did nothing but plait, put little girls’ hair up into ponytails and paint their nails. There was a brief period in which he played shooting with the boys, but it was only for about ten minutes before Rachel’s pouty face drew him back into the thick of the kiddie hair salon.

The parents streamed into the hotel’s Kids Club steadily at about five o’clock and continued to come until six. When the last child was picked up, waving a frantic goodbye to Harry and almost crying at having to depart from Louis’ company, Harry collapsed into a small chair, almost missing it and dropping like a rock to the floor.

“How do you do that every day?” Harry asked, wiping his brow. “It’s hard work.”

“I don’t do it _every_ day,” Louis said, helping Harry up from the too-tiny seat. “Just four days a week. And it pays the bills, doesn’t it? I enjoy it anyways.”

“Yeah, I enjoyed it too, doesn’t mean it isn’t bloody exhausting.”

“I was helping all those ones get blood off their hands and knees. You had it easy in here, painting your nails and all,” Louis teased, smiling softly in Harry’s direction as he shuffled a few pages of drawings around on a nearby table. “Although you do look lovely with that colour.”

The girls had decided upon a red for his nails, and Harry had no choice really but to agree with them (he didn’t particularly want to refuse, either). Now, he found himself appreciating their decision even more. After all, Louis liked it.

“We almost had a paint fight before, you know,” Harry said, grinning at the memory of Bailey’s shocked voice as a blob of paint flicked upwards and bounced onto her hair. “Looks like you were a part of it too.” He pointed to a little piece of blue on Louis’ cheek.

“Who are you to judge me?” Louis asked, indignantly. “I’ll have you know your entire being is covered in pastels.”

“Oh,” Harry said. Humour was building up in his chest, and despite how hard he tried he couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. He placed his palm onto a page soaked in nothing but white paint and began to move closer to his friend. Louis’ eyes rested upon his palm, and, suddenly realising when it was too late what Harry was to do, he let out a squeal.

“Harry, don’t you fucking – oh my god, you idiot!”

Harry laughed, admiring the hand shaped paint splodge on the front of his dungarees. “I could’ve put it somewhere else,” he pointed out. Louis was pouting, but he wasn’t really annoyed, he could tell. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Where else would you put it?” Louis asked inquisitively. “Somewhere inappropriate and unprofessional, I suppose?”

“Probably,” Harry said, smirking devilishly. They remained at a dreaded bridgehead for a few moments before Louis relaxed, obviously no longer expecting anything.

He struck forwards with another palm full of paint, this time blue. He grabbed Louis in his left, clean arm and grabbed his ass with the other one. Louis wiggled around, laughing incessantly, the tips of his ears going bright red.

“Let – me – go,” he grunted, but he wasn’t pushing Harry away. He wasn’t doing anything, not really, and Harry’s hand was still on his arse when Maria walked in.

She raised her eyebrows almost comically into her hairline and averted her eyes, covering them with her hand. “I’ll come back at another time,” she spluttered, nearly crashing into the doorframe on her way out.

They stood in silence, Louis’ butt marked Harry’s in bright cyan blue. “That was my boss, you twat,” Louis said, but he was smiling.

“You’re really going to have to get new overalls, I think,” Harry said, grinning although he was blushing. “Or get them laundered or something. You look a mess.”

“I look like I was groped by a fucking giant,” Louis said, dropping down the overalls so he was standing in his normal trousers and t-shirt once again. He compared the size of their palms to further emphasise his point. “Do you see this? That’s not natural.”

“You know what they say about big hands...”

Louis blinked. “Did you seriously just make me think about the size of your penis?”

“Don’t act as if you haven’t before.”

“Fair enough.”

And that was it, end of conversation. They went back to discussing the playfulness of a specific group of kids without even a break. It was fluid, like liquid, and Louis was a tsunami wave.

*

The second they got out of the hotel, Louis having stopped briefly to explain to his boss that they were just messing around (Louis to be the type of person that twists words so perfectly it sounded completely innocent what they had been discussing), Harry typed into his phone ‘101 fun things to do in London’.

He then chose a subcategory of the top 10 things to do, because really, they didn’t have the time to do over a hundred things in one night. They barely had time to do one!

“Pick a random number,” Louis suggested before he had even begun scrolling. “And then we’ll do that.”

“Six,” Harry said. “It’s my lucky number.”

It was true. Six seemed to be the forefront of every good event that had transpired in his short life as well as the bad ones. His mother always said it was a weird number to favour because it was associated with the devil. Perhaps that was what Harry was.

“Meet the mummies at the British Museum,” Harry read out. “Rooms 62 and 63 hold exhibits which represent the ancient Egyptian view on death and the afterlife and make you feel like you’re Indiana Jones. However, you won’t be able to see the whole museum in one visit...”

“Useless then,” Louis declared, resting his head upon Harry’s shoulder. He had to stand on his tiptoes to do so. “Go to number eight.”

“See some magic at Hamley’s,” Harry recited. “This is a massive toy shop but also provides a good half hour of free entertainment for little ones, or a big old trip through an entire memory town built of Lego etc for the grown-ups.”

“If in doubt, go to a toy shop,” Louis exclaimed, smiling.

“Who said that?” Harry asked, feeling that it must be a quote.

“Me. There now. Let’s go to Hamley’s.”

Harry laughed. “Okay. Let’s go to Hamley’s.”

They got hot dogs on the way to the toy store, one with ketchup and one with mustard, and then ate half of them each before alternating. This habit had been cultivated whilst in Irish pubs, when they couldn’t decide upon a specific dessert and just decided to half everything on the menu between them. It seemed to work well, so now they adapted it for every meal they ate together.

Hamley’s didn’t disappoint. It was absolutely incredible, both a kid and an adult’s paradise. Harry thought that any toy he had ever had when he was younger and any that he had even dreamed of was housed within these four walls. There were Lego sculptures of famous characters, such as Kate and Will, and all around them there were people buzzing with the excitement.

Little toy planes whizzed around past their heads and robot cars drove in between the aisles, chased by over-enthusiastic kids and stressing mothers. There was a Spiderman sculpture dangling from the ceiling, which Louis found particular interest in, and Harry ended up treating his friend to several smaller versions of the same model. He got thanked by a kiss on the cheek and a squeeze of the hand, which Louis kept a firm hold of during the entire trip. He considered buying him the entire store if this was what he got in return; a smile and a bevy of his affection.

Harry followed Louis’ example and tried to squeeze into a model car in the middle of the floor, but it was significantly more difficult for him considering the length of his legs. When he had managed to get in his knees were up against the wheel and Louis was squished up against the door, but they were both laughing so hard they were pink in the face. This was, up with those days that he had thought of before, the best day of his life so far.

“Oh, let me buy you a teddy bear,” Louis said, running over to a large pile of stuffed animals. “Then you can sleep with it beside you and think of me.”

He was teasing, so Harry didn’t think it was the right time to say ‘I never stop thinking of you anyways, you’re all that’s on my mind when I’m trying to sleep and usually I can’t drift off so I just stay awake thinking wow how can one person make me feel so strongly’. It wasn’t right to declare your undying love in the middle of a kids’ store, anyways, right? (He had the sinking feeling that it was the perfect place, and he had just missed yet another opportunity.)

The next hour was filled up with various yells of “Harry, look at these marbles!” “Harry, check out these super-heroes!” “Harry, there’s a fucking Lego village how awesome is this place.” “This is quite possibly the best date ever, you know that?”

“Oh, so this is a date?” Harry asked, smirking to conceal his slight panic. Louis held up a small pair of binoculars and looked at him through them, smiling as he did so.  
“Of course,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing now, right? We’re dating?”

“Well, I don’t know what we are,” Harry admitted. Finally, there was the truth, the one thing he’d been withholding for fear of losing him, the only thing Harry was truly terrified of. “That’s kind of my main problem. I love you, you see.”

Louis considered him for a moment, setting down the novelty toy back onto the pile. “Hurry up and get to the till then,” he said, pushing Harry gently in the direction of the cash registers. The younger boy didn’t understand what was happening, and he felt distinctly as if Louis was avoiding the question, but stupidly he followed his instruction.

They walked out of Hamley’s with a bag filled with two pounds worth of 20p marbles, a teddy bear, two Spiderman figurines and a tiny electric hand-held fan in an elastic bag. Harry had it strapped tightly around his wrist, which was just as well, because the second they got out of the store he would’ve dropped it otherwise.

Louis hopped up onto the low windowsill of the toy-shop, pulled Harry closer by the collar of his shirt, and pressed their lips together. They remained that way, touching each other more closely, more intimately than they ever had before, and it was just as Harry had dreamt it.

It was spontaneous, and it was unexpected, and it was in the presence of thousands of people but Harry didn’t care despite his previous hatred of PDA because it was _Louis_. It was Louis Tomlinson who was kissing him right now, who was breathing the same air as him, who had his hand on his back and who he could feel hitching in breath right underneath his fingertips. Harry’s own hand was pressed onto the small of Louis’ back, unwavering in its affection.

Eventually, when oxygen got too scarce and their ribs were heaving with the friction of their mouths, Louis pulled away, only slightly, and rested his forehead against Harry’s. It took a few moments before Harry could bring himself to speak.

“Why didn’t you do that before?” he asked, grinning manically, like a lotto winner. Louis just laughed breathlessly.

“We were in a toy store,” Louis said. “I couldn’t kiss you how I wanted in front of kids, that’s just wrong.”

Harry shook his head and drifted his lips against Louis’ a couple more times before expanding. “I mean, why didn’t you do this _before_? Like, six months ago before.”

“I already told you,” Louis protested. “I wasn’t sure you liked me.”

“Are you sure now?” Harry asked, vaguely amused. It was the only emotion he could muster besides irritation at the lost time, all because he’d been too scared to tell Louis the truth.

Louis nodded immediately. “Definitely,” he responded.

Their lips rejoined, and there they stood, two boys kissing against the outside window of Hamley’s, Harry in his jeans, white t-shirt and green army jacket and Louis in his black trousers and red polo shirt. And it was perfect, just like Harry knew it would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is going to push me a bit out of my comfort zone, so it might take me a while to get it out. Hopefully you enjoy this though! They've finally kissed ;) Thank you for all the comments and kudos, it means so much.


	8. Chapter 8

The others’ response to Harry and Louis’ relationship was just as expected.

When they walked into Niall’s apartment, their hands were entwined and their faces were pink from the wind. Harry supposed they had known what he was to say before he had uttered the words; when Harry phoned Niall and said he had a big announcement, Niall had screamed down his Blackberry, “About fucking time!” So, they didn’t really have to say anything, but Louis did anyways, smirking with a glint in his eyes that rivalled the very stars.

“I guess we’re together, or something,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if it meant nothing (it was everything; it was galaxies and mountains and the contours of Louis’ face underneath the flickering light of Niall’s living room). “I mean, we kissed a bit outside a toy shop, so I guess that constitutes a relationship, don’t you think young Harold?”

Harry, who hadn’t stopped grinning the past hour, nodded frantically. They had previously agreed to act calm about the whole thing, but Harry didn’t think he _could_ chill, not when Louis was involved. Thankfully the blue eyed boy didn’t display an ounce of annoyance at his abandonment of the plan, but even if he had Harry thinks it would’ve disappeared within seconds anyways.

Eleanor leapt up from the sofa and began kissing Louis’ cheeks frantically. “You – finally – listened – to – me,” she enthused, shaking his shoulders in between each word. “You went for the good guy for once!”

Harry – who was quite pleased that he was considered a ‘good guy’ – spent the next four weeks admiring every goddamn inch of Louis’ frame, of his personality, the way in which he was always too quick thinking for him to catch up to. They were the Dream Team, the Dynamic Duo, and now, they were the Couple, and Harry thought that was the best title yet.

Unfortunately, all great things must come to an end, like Jack and Rose, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, although not quite as dramatically. They were relaxing on the sofa on their one month anniversary, planning to watch The Holiday just for the memories, and Harry had almost forgotten about the moment which loomed ten minutes from now (almost, never completely; it remained in the back of his head like an incurable virus, a cancer, eating away at his insides).

“I think we need some M&Ms,” Louis announced, his voice rumbling through Harry’s ribcage, making his heart thump painfully against the bones. “Tradition and all that, you know?”

“I think we have some in the cupboard,” Harry muttered. He never wanted Louis to leave his sight, never wanted to have the opportunity to lose him. He wondered how people who didn’t have his talent coped with the idea that whoever they loved could be gone within an instant and they would never know. Would they feel some kind of soul leave their body? Would they know, without even hearing the words, that their soulmate was dead? Or did they live on forever inside of them, as Celine Dion would like to believe?

Harry wasn’t sure, and he never wanted to find out. Since meeting Louis, he had become increasingly determined to go first so that he would never have to live a day without this boy; this boy who changed everything without even meaning to.

Louis hopped up from his position lying against Harry’s torso and made his way into the kitchen. The door was wide open, so when Harry strained his neck he could see Louis – wearing only one of Harry’s oversized sweaters which covered just a bit too much, like a short dress - hop up onto the counter and search through the drawers he couldn’t reach otherwise.

“I don’t see any,” Louis called out, seemingly unaware that Harry was watching him, admiring every movement. “What kind of person doesn’t have M&Ms?”

“The same person who just ran out of popcorn when he met the boy of his dreams,” Harry said fondly. Louis re-entered the living room with an adorably delightful pout on his face, pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his small hands. Everything about him was so delicate, so petite, everything but...

“I think I’m going to go get some trousers on and buy some then,” Louis said, snapping him once again out of his thoughts. Harry was about to agree when the flashing light appeared above the boy’s head, counting down. Half an hour to go. In half an hour, if Harry couldn’t keep him here, the earth would be one down and about fifty percent empty.

Harry stood up from the sofa and caught Louis’ wrist in his hand. It fit so perfectly in between his fingers, like they were meant to be entwined. “Don’t leave me,” Harry pleaded, hoping that his wavering tone would say enough that he wouldn’t have to explain. Louis raised an eyebrow but stopped. A soft smile worked its way onto his face.

“You’ll be fine for five minutes,” Louis murmured, leaning in to capture Harry’s lips. Their mouths drifted against each other, too softly to be their last (it wouldn’t be their last though; Harry would make sure of it). “We have absolutely nothing to eat in this fucking house. I swear, you and Zayn must never _shop_...”

“Maybe you should move in,” Harry said suddenly, without missing a beat. He had been thinking of asking Louis for a while, but he’d wanted to sort everything out before he did. Now, he just wanted to keep Louis talking for at least half an hour. “Think about it. I mean we’re dating, we’ve known each other a year...”

“That’s exactly the point,” Louis said, looking considerably surprised. However, it had worked – all thoughts of heading to the shop had been erased. “We’ve only known each other a year. You could be an axe murderer or a thief or a...”

“Do I look like a badass criminal?” Harry chuckled wrapping his arms around Louis’ back. “You know me, Lou. You’re basically living here already.”

“Well,” Louis said, melting into Harry’s touch but looking quite angry about it. “I’m not really into the idea of moving in with you and your roommate. I’d feel like the third wheel, like, all the time.”

Harry laughed. “I wasn’t talking about you moving in here,” he said. “We could find our own place. If you wanted, of course,” he added on hurriedly.

Louis scrutinised him for a second as if deciding whether he was being serious or not. Finally, after what seemed like a decade but was only a couple of minutes, he nodded. “You’d almost think you wanted to spend more time with me,” Louis said. He was trying to be teasing, Harry knew by him, but his voice wavered.

“Of course I do, baby,” Harry muttered, his lips drifting over the sensitive skin on Louis’ neck. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Mark.”

This fucker again, Harry thought, but he stopped himself from saying it. The first time Harry and Louis had slept together was two weeks ago, and they had done it several times since, but never in the light of day. It was exactly as amazing as Harry thought it would be, but despite the amount of pleading he did with Louis the other boy wouldn’t allow him to see any bare skin.

“Any time I tried to dirty talk Mark all he could come up with was, ‘Thanks Chubby’,” Louis explained one morning over breakfast. “It kind of knocked me a bit. It’s stupid, I know, but...”

Harry felt a wave of hatred wash over him, a feeling that he had never before experienced. “I don’t want to hear anything more about him,” he had said fiercely, perhaps too much so. “You’re beautiful Louis. Let me prove it to you.”

He captured Louis’ lips once more, kissing him slowly and deeply, taking his time to lick inside Louis’ mouth. His hands moved to the other boy’s ass and he cupped it in his palms, loving the feel of skin on naked skin. The sweater pooled around his wrists. Louis’ breath was hitching in his chest, and his face was slightly pink, but maybe that was because Harry could see all too clearly the effect his kiss had on him.

“You kiss like you talk,” Louis laughed breathlessly against his shoulder, biting into it slightly as Harry rolled his hips into his crotch. “All slow and sexy.”

“Why thank you,” Harry teased, squeezing Louis’ arse each time their dicks touched, separated by three layers of fabric. “Maybe that explains why you get hard just kissing.”

He was bright red now, and Harry felt bad. He let go of his ass and gripped onto his thighs, lifting him up. Louis knew what he was to do before he did it. He rested his legs on Harry’s waist and wrapped his arms around Harry’s neck.

They were kissing up against the wall now, which seemed to be their favoured position, and Harry thought about how this was a good way to prevent a death; having sex. In fact, having sex was pretty much the answer to all of life’s problems, especially when it was with Louis.

Kisses pooled at the base of his neck, Louis leaving little bruises that he’d have difficulty explaining along his collarbone.

“I want to touch you,” Harry moaned, little whimpers passing his lips. It was getting increasingly difficult to support Louis’ weight when his own knees were threatening to buckle beneath him. Louis shuffled slightly and paused kissing, resting his lips against Harry’s chest.

“It’s bright though,” Louis mumbled uncertainly. “We can do it tonight or...”

A little flutter of uncomfortable irritation welled up inside Harry, almost threatening to leave frustrated tears harbouring in the corners of his eyes. “I want to do it now though,” he protested, his tone whiney like a child demanding candy. Louis pulled away, biting his lip.

“You’re gorgeous, Louis,” Harry said, because he looked like he was considering and he wanted to make the decision easier. “I just want to see you, to kiss every part of you and know where to put my mouth next.”

“But I’m...” Louis looked conflicted. “I’m not as...”

“What’s wrong, darling?” Harry asked. His fingers were leaving little red marks on the tan of Louis’ thighs, marking him his.

“I’m not as good looking as you or whatever.”

Harry blinked, slightly taken aback. Of all the things he was expecting Louis to say, this wasn’t one of them. “You’re what?”

“I know it’s stupid.”

“Nothing you say is stupid.”

“But you’re like...” Louis let out a groan. Harry noticed he had softened against his torso once again, and cursed internally. “You’re _Harry Styles_. Everyone loves you, and you’ve got like porn star lips...”

“What?”

“And you’re so confident in yourself and I just can’t be that way,” Louis finished, somewhat lamely, looking up at Harry from underneath his fringe. “I always think you’re going to go for someone better.”

Harry, now convinced in what he was going to do, kissed Louis hard on the mouth and stumbled over to the sofa. “I couldn’t get anyone better than you, Lou,” Harry said. “A person like that doesn’t exist.”

“You really think that?” Louis asked, lying up against the couch. Harry could see almost everything under the jumper, but he wanted all of the fabric gone, for the sweatshirt to be lying crumpled on the floor within a matter of seconds.

“I know that.”

Louis looked at Harry then with such fondness in his features that Harry thought he might just explode with loving him. He wouldn’t die due to ‘self inflicted injuries’. No, he would die because of Louis goddamn Tomlinson, and the sad thing was that he wouldn’t even mind.

“Will you let me in then, Lou?” Harry asked gently, his voice getting deeper with anticipation. Louis, who was looking more comfortable than perhaps ever before, nodded.

“I might not be very good,” he said. “But I’ll try.”

Harry didn’t even bother contradicting him before he caught the end of the jumper and began to pull it upwards. Louis laughed uncertainly from underneath it, his head getting caught in the collar.

“I don’t think you thought this through,” he chuckled, but Harry had meant for this to happen. Louis couldn’t see him admiring every inch of his body, taking in the tan-line where his trousers must begin, the delightful expanse of skin that he wanted to kiss and lick and bite all over.

“I’m not very good at this either,” he admitted, tugging the sweater away from the boy’s head. Louis landed back against the cushion, his hair delightfully messy and sprawled up on the fabric, all bare and waiting for Harry. He was Harry’s, and Harry was his, and that’s the way it has always been. Everything else that had prevented them from meeting was just a bump in the road. “So you don’t need to worry.”

“We’ll get better together, then,” Louis muttered. “You know what they say.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

“Exactly.”

Harry smiled and dropped a kiss on Louis’ lips, trailing his tongue slowly along his mouth. Louis whimpered and placed his hands on the back of Harry’s head to pull him closer. Harry mirrored his action but remained bestowing affections softly, teasing.

“Get this off,” Louis mumbled, unbuckling Harry’s belt with shaking fingers. Harry helped him in his mission by discarding his top, throwing it onto the pile beside the lilac sweater. “Now just kiss me, for God’s sake.”

“Good things come to those who wait,” Harry chimed, but he conceded, crashing their mouths together until they were just a mass of lips and flesh and little cuts from where their teeth collided. Harry couldn’t remember the last time he’d kissed someone this frantically... Wait, he could. It was when he had lost his virginity to his fourth girlfriend, and he was trying to make himself feel something that wasn’t there. Now, all he wanted was to be closer to Louis, to be as close as any two humans could ever be but even that wouldn’t be enough.

Louis pulled Harry’s boxers off so that they were both naked and throbbing, better in the daylight than they had been under the cover of darkness. Harry took in everything; the white mark on Louis’ shoulder that he knew had come from a football accident, a few scratches on his chest Harry himself had left, a bruise on the side of his hip from where he crashed against the counter. And Louis did the same thing, although he vocalised it; he told Harry all about the length of his fingers and the dip in his back, the curling of his toes and the pinkness of his cheeks, things that Harry had never found anything beautiful to love in before.

“Put your hands on me Jack,” Louis quoted, and Harry smiled, working his way down to between Louis’ legs until he was palming him. Louis rutted upwards, making little panting sounds, and Harry was trying not to come already because it had only been ten minutes and that would be embarrassing.

But it was _Louis_ and he was beautiful and every time he looked at him he felt like bursting out into tears of emotion or adoration or something in between (definitely love).

“Do you like that?” Harry muttered against Louis’ ear, his voice coming out thick and deep. Louis nodded desperately, so unlike his confident, charismatic self. He was basically pleading with Harry to touch him, to do something apart from just drift the surface.

“I’m gonna come before you’re even inside me,” Louis stuttered, dragging his fingernails down Harry’s back absentmindedly.

“I’ll do the same if you keep doing that,” Harry groaned, and then that was it, he couldn’t take it anymore. “Bedroom, now,” he ordered, and Louis quite literally jumped after him, following him obediently.

“Bed, now,” he demanded, slightly surprised at the authority in his voice. Louis nodded, quivering, and obeyed, resting down on the pillows with his hole all pink and ready. His own fingers worked their way down, scissoring away as Harry searched for the lube, and by the time he returned to the bed Louis was almost starry-eyed, leaking pre-cum.  
“Don’t do that, baby,” Harry muttered, although it was gorgeous, so deliciously intoxicating that Harry was about to tip over just watching. “Let me.”

Louis’ fingers dropped from his ass and rested against the sheets, his fingertips shaking. Harry slicked lube over himself and crawled so that he was hovering above Louis, all wide eyed and eager.

“I like you like this,” Louis whispered as Harry’s fingers made their way inside of him. He let out a moan, and Harry did as well as he tightened around him. “You’re so...”

He couldn’t finish the compliment. Harry rested himself in between his thighs, just ghosting his hole. Louis inhaled sharply, stroking Harry’s hand which was pinning him up against the bed, feeling the anticipation mounding.

Harry loved that it was _him_ that was making Louis look like this, act like this, shake like this. He loved when they connected, when Louis let out a little puff of breath that smelt like home against his lips, adored how he felt constricting around him.

“Fuck, Lou,” he muttered, thinking that there were no profanities already invented that could summarise how he felt in that moment. He would have to invent one (could the name ‘Louis’ be an euphemism for sex? He thought so). “You’re so ready for this.”

“For you,” Louis muttered, reduced to monosyllables. He was gorgeous, in every way, and he filled every hole inside of Harry, every bit of him that was less than perfect. “All for you.”

It was slow at the beginning, all careful movements and delicate kisses, their lips already throbbing from before. Harry’s own felt swollen. He knew they’d be red for at least a day afterwards, but this was what he loved about sleeping with Louis; he had physical memories for days to accompany his static thoughts. And God, Harry was wrapped around his finger in a way that his mother had warned him never to be.

Louis nodded, and that was all it took to increase the friction. Their skin burnt against each other with increasing need, leaving little pathways where it touched. Every point of contact burnt through Harry, every sound Louis made the chorus of a song that revolved solely around him.

God, even the world was here for this, and it stood still as Harry’s hand worked its way down to Louis’ front. It was mere seconds before they collapsed together, their vision blurred.

It was no longer a vivid dream, imagined only in the solidarity of Harry’s own bed. Louis was all soft and fucked, clutching onto Harry’s skin, and it was a lucid scene, a bitter melody.

What a perfect way to save a life.

*

Harry woke up the next morning to an empty bed.

He wondered if this was what it felt like to be abandoned.

He wondered if it was something he had done, something he had said. He shouldn’t have insisted on doing it in the light of day, even if it was the single greatest thing he had experienced. He had been woken up in a way by the sight of Louis’ thighs, strained on either side of his own waist, Louis’ neck exposed as his head fell back against the bed.

The literal waking up happened the same as it did every other day; his alarm clock went off at seven, chiming irritatingly cheerfully. It was almost like Louis’ voice used to be the day after sex. It was high and filled with promise, wide awake and ready to face the day.

It was pathetic, really, but he ran his hands over the empty side of the bed, as if Louis had somehow sunken into the very fibres of the mattress. Unfortunately, he found nothing but a couple balls of lint and the smell of Louis’ shampoo which lingered on the pillow. He lay back down and pulled it over his face, and screamed.

He screamed for so long and so loud that his vocal chords began to sting with the friction. He yelled and cursed and damned and fucked and shrieked and cried and yes, even sobbed a little, but thankfully the duck down his mother had insisted on buying him worked wonders in muting his voice. It sounded like nothing more than a mere whisper on the breeze.

Harry took a break and stared at the ceiling, and then squealed some more before pushing himself off the bed and pulling on a pair of boxers (not that it mattered, but Zayn might be back).

The first thing he heard when he walked out into the hall was music playing. And not the crappy opera music his neighbours used to put on at high volumes in the morning - they stopped after Zayn got Liam to threaten them - but The Bamboos, who were just as cheesy perhaps as the Beatles. They were better than yet more screaming anyways (Harry refused to believe that opera was anything more than glorified yelling, despite how many times Sophia chastised his ignorance).

_‘Think of all the places that I wanna go and all the things I haven’t done yet...'_

There was soft singing, as well, and upon closer listening Harry discovered that it was coming from his kitchen, and that it wasn’t Zayn; the voice was too high pitched and fluid for that. A wash of relief battered against him, and so when his eyes rested on the sight of Louis at the cooker making breakfast in a pair of white briefs, he could do nothing but grin. Well, that, and kiss him on the nape of his neck as he rested his head on his shoulder.

 _‘Where does the time go? Hasn’t been so long since I was young,’_ Louis sang, smiling. Upon further inspection Harry could tell that he was making scrambled eggs and bacon. It was basically burnt – Louis couldn’t cook to save his life – but he knew that he was so unbelievably happy that he was even here he’d eat anything the other boy served up.

“Hey,” Harry mumbled, moving his lips to Louis’ cheeks. His hand squeezed Louis’ ass, but this time, he didn’t flinch. “I thought you’d left me.”

“Why would I do that?” Louis asked, pushing his cheek in closer to Harry’s own so that their faces were pressed against each other. “I’m a snuggler. I stay over. You’re just going to have to deal with that.”

“You’re acting as if it’s our first time,” Harry chuckled. This was new though; Louis had never before left Harry in a cold, half empty bed.

“That’s what it feels like,” Louis admitted, shifting the egg around the pan with a wooden spatula. His movements were jilted and awkward, and his fingers were still shaking. They usually did in Harry’s vicinity. Why was he only now realising? “And stop that. I’m trying to be a good boyfriend and cook for you.”

“Since when did you cook?” Harry asked, taking his hand away from Louis’ half exposed butt somewhat reluctantly. “I thought you were practically allergic to kitchen utensils.”

“Since when did I have sex when you could see me?”

“Touché,” Harry said, but he was smiling. “Have you thought anymore about my offer? Moving in?”

“I’m still not sure,” Louis said, taking the pan off the heat. Harry moved away and rested against the island, watching Louis as he haphazardly poured the egg out onto the plates without allowing the still uncooked bacon to follow. He went back over to the cooker, but Harry remained a mere metre away.

“I mean, I’ve never really called anywhere home before, you know? Even with my mum, we were always moving house, I learnt not to get attached to things.” Or people, Harry assumed, but he didn’t say a word. “Moving in with Eleanor was okay, because we were both under no illusion it would be forever. But...”

He trailed off, and Harry knew that he was almost done talking about it. He turned around to the island and bent down to open its bottom drawer. It was his and Zayn’s coveted ‘everything’ cupboard, and so there was phone chargers, envelopes, sandwich bags, sharpeners, pretty much everything. Despite the mess, it took him only a few seconds to find a black, washable Sharpie. He went over to Louis, who didn’t object, and bent down so that his face was level with the small of his back.

The pen moved fluently over the fabric of the underwear, not a single second of hesitation captured in ink (of course, how would there be? There was none). Harry looked at his masterpiece with satisfaction and clicked the lid back onto the pen. He stood up and smirked at Louis with dimples popping in his cheeks, his hair still messed up from where the other boy had played with it during the night. Louis loved his hair.

Louis left the pan with the sizzling bacon for a few seconds and scuttled into the bathroom. He came back less than a minute later with pink cheeks and a wide, unabashed grin on his face. Harry had written his signature across Louis’ underwear.

“You belong somewhere now,” Harry said thickly. “If you want to.”

This time, Louis didn’t even spare the burning bacon a second glance. He basically jumped into Harry’s arms and kissed him frantically, until they weren’t quite sure whose breath was whose.

“I’d like it, then,” Louis mumbled sheepishly, looking more embarrassed now than he probably ever had before (this was a twenty four hour period of firsts, Harry thought). “To have you as my home.”

The rest of the morning was filled up with hazy kisses, cuddling on the sofa, dancing to The Bamboos and a tweet from Louis’ account with a picture of Harry attached; _‘Best breakfast partner ever xx’._

Harry knew was that he wanted Louis to be the last voice he heard each and every night for the rest of his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this took some work, but I think I'm alright with the result. This is the first time I've ever tried to write even soft (really soft, it's basically plush) smut so I'm not sure how it worked out?  
> Thank you all for your comments and kudos! I am amazed this has reached over 800 views already! Love all of you guys so much xx


	9. Chapter 9

Graduation from law school was a lot less celebratory than Harry thought it would be, but it was a hell of a lot more liberating.

No longer would he spend his mornings rushing to get dressed, silently cursing his decision to take all morning classes. No longer would he face the constant ridicule of being placed in a room filled with people he had nothing in common with besides his age, or have the threat of exams hanging over his head like a bad omen.

Harry had never been particularly adventurous. Confident, intelligent, constantly eager to learn perhaps, but not spontaneous enough to pack up his bags and go on a worldwide road trip or anything of the sort. Now the world sprawled out in front of him, beckoning like the blue of Louis’ eyes or the tan of his shoulders, all big and perfect and beautiful.  
The feeling that he hadn’t yet discovered a lot about the Earth had always remained reticent within him, leaving Harry slightly uncomfortable at the unknown. Maybe he hoped that in his various perusals of ancient cultures he would find something about his gift; an Egyptian god that shared it, a specific myth that was passed down through generations, something, anything. But he never did, and he was as unsure of himself and what he was (not who, not anymore) as he had been at ten years old. He had decided then not to fall in love, but he never fully committed. He had never believed there could be someone he cared for so deeply and who felt the same in return.

Now the boy he was so inherently desperate for clapped with proud tears burgeoning in the corners of his eyes, standing only a couple of rows back from the front of the hall. He was beside Zayn, who Harry should’ve told to stop smoking sooner but it was too late now, he had already been diagnosed with emphysema (two weeks ago, the doctor supposed he had ten years left, but he was wrong. He only had six) and Niall, whose nephew he had rescued from an untimely fate.

What was going on in Harry’s mind when he decided to tell Theo of his gift? And why hadn’t he done the same thing before, discussed it with his mother, or with Zayn, or even Niall? Why had he chosen that one child’s life to save when there were so many more?

He was a good person, or at least that’s what Louis thought, and that was exactly what was making this so difficult.

His gift had never been a big thing, as he mentioned before. It had just been a quirk, like Zayn’s nervous twitch or the way Liam couldn’t drink one pint without getting completely plastered and drinking ten more. It hadn’t been anything of significance, but it was all changing.

Around him, people were dying, people he could’ve saved. The little girl he walked past on his way to work in the evening had died in the car crash three years ago he’d known was to happen. And her mother had committed suicide, like he knew would happen. And he hadn’t stopped it, hadn’t even considered offering them the knowledge they needed to stop their lights from flickering out. Why?

Louis. The answer was always Louis.

Harry had saved the other boy’s life exactly five times. He thought over them, knowing the memories as vividly as the back of his own hand, as he stepped up to get his degree.

1\. They’d gone on a couples’ vacation for their two year anniversary to Paris. Apparently, many who decide to kill themselves choose ‘romantic’ ways (Harry wasn’t sure, but the statistics prove this to be true) such as poisoning, jumping off high buildings or, in the cases Harry looked up days before Louis’ forecasted death, jumping off the Eiffel Tower. The ‘Iron Lady’ – which is 1,063 feet, interestingly – is the third most popular method of suicide in France. After AIDS, suicide is the second most frequent cause of death in Paris. Relatively strange considering Paris is supposed to be a place of happiness, of love, but hey. Life’s strange sometimes. (He’s getting sidetracked. That had been happening a lot lately.) Louis wasn’t going to commit suicide, no, but he was going to fall off the Eiffel Tower accidentally. What was interesting about this was that the second floor – the most popular destination for jumping – had a fence placed around it to prevent jumping. It was bad for business. Unfortunately, the third floor did not, and, as Harry found out, if you fell at a specific angle you could snap your neck falling from one floor to the other. Thankfully, despite not thinking of that beforehand, Harry caught onto Louis’ wrist, and lost another six months.

2\. They went out ice-skating at Christmas when Louis brought Harry back to the Tomlinson household in Doncaster. This wasn’t as much of an interesting topic to research – ice skating deaths were very rare, but somehow Louis was managing to do it – so it was relatively simple to save him from falling and hitting his head against the wall of the rink. Harry thought that it was like killing birds with two stones – Johannah opened up more swiftly than she normally would’ve after hearing Harry had saved her son’s life.

3\. During a particular leftover-hurricane storm in London, which was followed by months of shitty weather that made Harry even more depressed than he already was, a tree fell down in Bloomsbury Square. Emergency services managed to rescue a woman from her car, and were also able to calm down a couple not far from the scene who had strangely abandoned their vehicle mere moments before the accident. Surprisingly, one of the boys was decidedly more shaken up than the other. You could almost say he had been expecting it (ironically hilarious, eh?).

4\. Yet again the fire services were called, this time to an apartment in Central London, where residents Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson were affected by a freak house fire. Styles believed that it was caused by Louis’ cooking, and upon further inspection into the evidence 999 agreed with this conclusion. Thankfully, their front door was not locked despite it being late at night and so they were able to escape the flames unscathed. Weird.

5\. Louis choked on his chicken during their two-and-a-half year anniversary. Harry had read up on first aid for a couple of weeks beforehand, and so he was able to carry out the Heimlich manoeuvre without much difficulty (he probably should’ve practiced it on a dummy beforehand, but the power of hindsight is an amazing thing).

He had twenty four and a half years left now. That was a significant chunk out of his previous forty, but somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to mind. Because it was Louis he had spent those years for, it was Theo, and it was the future of the world as it would be after he was gone; still having Louis, still being bright and gorgeous. Still undiscovered. Harry wondered if he should’ve wrote a book or something about his gift – perhaps Zayn, who was venturing into writing, could use it as a plotline – but he had time. He kept telling himself he had time until he almost began to believe it.

They had ended up moving in together, into an apartment that smelt of home and warmth and sincerity. It was messy, but not Harry and Zayn levels of messy, and it was clean in certain rooms but not Eleanor clean. Homely was the word Louis used to describe it. It was how he spoke of Harry now as well; as his home. Harry liked hearing it pass his lips, perhaps even more so than ‘I love you’.

There was a Hamley’s teddy bear leaning against the mirror above the fireplace, and there was Spiderman figurines hanging from the shower curtain. There were two pairs of shoes in the hallway, Vans and brown boots, and Louis purposefully left them where he knew Harry would trip. He still hadn’t stopped laughing at the clumsiness, no matter how many times it happened. There was a large collection of vinyl records in the TV cabinet and an even larger collection of various whiskey brands on top of the kitchen cupboards (they were Louis’ but he needed Harry to reach them. It was fun during arguments when Louis had to reluctantly call his boyfriend back to get him alcohol).

Harry did yoga now, every morning and evening, probably due to his increasing anxiety. His appetite came and went. Some nights he couldn’t sleep and spent the entire eight hours staring at the ceiling and caressing the top of Louis’ arm. He watched as Zayn got a job as an animator and Liam got into fire-fighting. He watched Niall became an engineer and Louis a substitute English teacher whilst he lacked the motivation to even begin job searching. Louis finally had enough one day, saying, “I’m not having a loser boyfriend who doesn’t even have a job” and called up an old friend. Now, Harry was his loser fiancé with a nine to five legal job he hated. But he still had Louis.

He remembered the proposal every day around breakfast time, when he first saw Louis’ face wide awake and smiling, and he didn’t think he could ever forget the minor details. The white speck of dust that landed on the black of Louis’ tuxedo jacket. The fact that he was even wearing a tuxedo in the first place when he always swore vehemently that he wouldn’t. The small, tentative smile working its way onto his handsome features as he looked up at Harry from the ground. The fact that he was doing it in London, in front of the university park where they had their first date, when the apartment they had watched The Holiday in belonged to someone else now. How every goddamn person in London seemed to be congregating around them, waiting with bated breath for the answer.

Now, Harry had always been against the idea of public proposals. He considered it manipulative in a way, because they forced the person in question to say yes even if that wasn’t what they were really thinking due to the way social constructs worked. But _HarryandLouis_ were different. Louis, despite his shaking fingers and his gradually reddening cheeks, knew that Harry loved him, and he knew that Harry knew it too. There was no other answer in Harry’s mind, not even a real need to have a proposal; it had been encrypted since they met that they would end up together. Still, he nodded, and he took the silver band out of the plush and put it on his finger. He smiled at the boy who was squinting in the sunlight.

“It’s not really as big as I was expecting,” Harry teased. “But I suppose it will do.”

“Does that mean you’re ready for this?” Louis asked as he stood up from the ground, not taking his eyes off Harry even to wipe the gravel from his rented suit knee (he rented a suit, the nerd). “I’ve got to warn you, I’m a handful.”

“I’ve got big hands,” Harry said, pressing his fingers against Louis’ to compare. “I can hand-le it.”

Louis face-palmed, literally face-palmed. “You did not just make a pun,” he groaned. “I’m proposing to you, you big idiot.”

“Who said proposals couldn’t be entertaining?” Harry chuckled, pressing his lips against the middle of Louis’ forehead. Louis pouted but gave in, melting into Harry’s touch.

“I’m just glad you said yes,” he muttered. “It would’ve been really embarrassing for me if you didn’t.”

“Well,” Harry said. “I don’t think I could’ve done that, no matter how annoying and corny you are. I love you, you see.”

“I do see,” Louis said, grinning. Harry didn’t think he’d ever seen him smile so big. He made it a personal goal of his to see it increase in size with each passing year he’d spend with the boy, for as long as they might be together. “And you’re bound to know I’m completely gone for you.”

Harry pulled him into his arms, holding him tightly, as if there was nobody on earth that could tear them apart, not life nor cold, cruel death. The park was quiet around them, the spectators having dispersed after the seeming denouement, and everything was calm, quiet, tranquillity. “I had an inkling,” Harry muttered, and Louis laughed, his body shaking against Harry’s.

For a moment, everything was perfect. And then, in the cliché way most movie premises end up, everything fell apart.

He supposed that, if you were thinking about it in book terms, it was only halfway through and he had plenty of time to make things right. On the other hand, he could only have a chapter left. He didn’t know (although he knew. He knew without knowing). He just prayed that the time they had spent together learning each other’s bodies, touching like they knew each other as if their skin was made of Braille, would be enough to keep them together even when the weather got cooler.

Their fourth Christmas together (or perhaps it was their fifth, if you counted the year in which they were nothing but friends) Louis was working overtime to get some papers graded, but he refused to let Harry stay in the apartment with him. “You’d put me off, anyways,” Louis muttered, decidedly exhausted but still so effortlessly beautiful. “Anytime I look at you I want to kiss you. Not kissing you is like suffocating.”

“What do you suggest then?” Harry asked, knowing that he was, in fact, the reason for Louis’ lack of productivity and feeling sort of guilty about that. “Ni’s back in Ireland with Theo. Zayn and Liam are out doing God knows what. Eleanor and Sophia are Christmas shopping. Gemma’s taking care of her kids.” (Gemma had a little boy now named Tommy. Harry loved him a lot.)

“For such a charismatic guy,” Louis groaned. “You’re making it sound awfully difficult to get Christmas plans. Just go, walk into a bar and spend Christmas Eve with another lonely stranger. And I swear when you come home I’ll drop all of this and we’ll spend some time together, okay?”

“I’ll bring home a Chinese,” Harry said, stepping up and grabbing his scarf. “We can have a movie night. And if we fall asleep during it, these things happen.”

Harry knew that was exactly what _wouldn’t_ happen. Louis had this weird thing – “a quirk, Harold, it’s called a quirk” – about not drifting off during movies. No matter whether it was a Capital A Amazing movie such as Blood Diamond or Titanic or a crappy-ass movie like Mean Girls 2, Louis was determined to outlive it. That was exactly why he suggested this activity; he wanted to spend more time with the boy before they drifted off into nothingness. Louis knew that, so he grinned.

“Fine,” he said, waving Harry away with his hand, smirking. “Look, even when you’re leaving you’re distracting me.” Louis moved his eraser frantically over the page, scrunching his eyebrows in frustration. Harry imagined that this was what he must’ve looked like at school, which he hadn’t particularly enjoyed. He wondered why Louis had decided on a career path that trapped him firmly in education for the rest of his life given his bad memories of it.

“I’m sorry baby,” Harry muttered, leaning over to kiss Louis on the head. His movements were stifled by his thick winter coat and scarf. When Louis buried himself into Harry’s chest he could barely be seen for the plush. “I’m going now.”

“Be back before midnight,” Louis called out as Harry left the apartment with his keys tacked to the inside of his pocket (one of Louis’ inventions after Harry lost their house keys on a night out. Louis had been at Eleanor’s, so he slept in the corridor of their flat block. Louis had called him a drunken idiot, but he had laughed also).

“I will be,” Harry called out, smiling.

That was the first lie he’d told Louis in four years, and he didn’t even know it yet.

*

The local pub was a relatively classy establishment on most days of the year, but at Christmas it became little more than a dive. Perhaps Harry should’ve chosen a more high class place to drink that night – God knows London had enough choices – but he knew the selection of beer there was varied and he spoke freely to the regular customers, which basically consisted of drunks, truck drivers and sad university students drinking as if it would pay off their loans (it wouldn’t. Harry already tried).

There were the remainders of a brewery behind the building, its metal exterior hidden from the street and its walls crumbling down as he breathed. It was one of Niall’s favourite places in England despite the safety issues.

“Reminds me of Ireland,” he used to say, his voice coming out in little puffs, shrouded by the scent of beer. “All crumbly and shit. Perfect.” Harry agreed that it was beautiful in the way that most of London was – urban and slightly grimy – but he didn’t see the appeal Niall did for a respite there. He preferred inside the pub, where the walls were painted a variety of brown hues and a golden glow came from the flickering light behind the bar.

A couple of men Harry had grown friendly with described this place as their “other home” away from their wife and children, and despite the fact that Harry didn’t agree with the seemingly incessant need to escape commitment he understood where they were coming from. It felt comforting, like his mother’s living room but with more booze.

He didn’t recognise him at first. He hadn’t even thought about him for three years apart from every now and again when a little touch of his previous rage resurfaced, or when a reminder came up about Louis’ insecurities. Last he’d heard he’d moved in with some blonde girl he promptly cheated on, then went back to, then cheated on again, then married. Louis hadn’t cried, as Harry expected him to, and he didn’t propose to Harry directly afterwards to spite him, which Harry had feared. Rather, he had just looked at the marriage announcements in the daily paper with a sort of unreadable expression on his face and muttered, “Look. Proof even pigs can get fucked if they try hard enough.”

When the man turned around, Harry took in his broad shoulders that were easily the widest point on his body, the shortness of his neck, the beefiness of his arms. His whole image gave off the impression of blown-up doll/body builder/pin head.

Harry knew he had nothing to be defensive over. He was there by himself, after all. Louis wasn’t standing behind him or due to return to his side within moments. Hell, Louis wouldn’t even have to know that he had returned to London if Harry didn’t bother telling him, and that was what was best. The last thing Louis needed was coming face to face with the greatest prick to skim the surface of the Earth; Mark fucking Rodrickson.

Harry considered running, pathetically. He actually pondered over whether the height of the bar was substantial enough to constitute him hiding behind it. He thought about hiding in the bathrooms until he was sure Mark was gone. He wondered if he would even remember who Harry was. He doubted it, actually. Hadn’t Louis said that he had the intelligence of a hamster? That he was only in university by his rich father’s instruction and string pulling?

He had been stupid to even humour himself with that, because in his brief moment of hesitation in which he perused his options, Mark’s squinted and bloodshot gaze had rested solely upon his lanky figure. In the light of the bar, Harry couldn’t even tell what colour Mark’s eyes were, whether they were the reason Louis fell in love with the man.

“You.” Mark’s voice came out thick and deep, but not smooth as Harry’s was, not comforting as Louis frequently fawned over. You couldn’t fall asleep to his tone, not when it made the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention and your hand go to the phone in your pocket, just in case. It wasn’t that he was a thug – at least, Harry didn’t think he was. Surely Louis would’ve mentioned it – but he certainly looked like one, all thick and foreboding, too dense to think of the consequences.

It was a natural human reaction to think immediately as Mark walked towards you about the odds of you winning a fight against him. Harry was no different. Mark obviously weighed more – perhaps two or three of him – and hadn’t Liam said he worked out? (Harry had been to the gym exactly three times in the past three years, and that was only because Louis begged him to go with him a couple of times before realising that Harry was completely hopeless in exercise. Louis and Liam were workout buddies now instead.)

Mark was ruthless, Harry was cautious. However, he knew one thing for sure that night; no matter what happened, he wouldn’t die. He could relax knowing that whatever pain was to come would only be temporary.

“You’re Louis’ wee friend, aren’t you?” Mark asked. The closer he got the more Harry realised the effects of the alcohol on him; he was giddy, not confrontational. He exhaled even more smoothly, feeling his shoulders droop down.

“Yeah, I am,” he said, not bothering to correct him. He wanted the conversation to be over swiftly – hell, he would rather it never began.

“What was your name again?” Mark questioned, pressing his glass up to his forehead as he mimed thinking. The beer sloshed around angrily in the cup. “It was some fucked up Paki name, right?”

Harry felt a little bubble of irritation appear within him. This wasn’t the first time Zayn had been spoken about in this way because of his religion, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. After one incident in which Niall threw his vodka and coke over a particularly racist gap-shite at a bar, Zayn had instructed them never to do anything for him again. “You have to swear,” he said, “that no matter what people say, you’ll let it go over your head, all right? It’s what I’ve learnt to do.” Harry didn’t think that was fair, but he promised. He wasn’t intending to break his vow now, especially not for this fucker.

“Zack or something,” Mark mumbled, nearly incoherently.

“Harry,” Harry said. Mark shrugged, not caring. He glugged down the remainder of his beer and then slammed the glass down on the counter, making Harry jump. The bartender however, obviously used to this treatment, slid another beer down towards Mark, who started drinking once again as if yeast was his oxygen supply.

“You’re another one of those faggots, too, right?”

Harry prided himself on his self control. It was the only thing that made him and Louis work, after all. Louis had these moods where he wanted conflict, and Harry was more than willing to listen to him scream and yell without providing anything himself. His mother used to tell him ‘don’t say anything in anger you’ll regret later’. Easier said than done, but Harry was used to it now. He nodded grimly, staring into his own glass.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Mark muttered, shaking his head in apparent disgust. “Thought I saw you two kissing a couple times. You together now?”

“We are,” Harry said, the only words he could force past his lips. He wasn’t drunk enough to deal with this. He was pretty sure he’d _never_ be drunk enough to deal with this. “We’re engaged, actually.”

Mark let out a spontaneous, loud laugh, so short that it must’ve lasted only a syllable. “How can you be _engaged_?” he spluttered, drawing out the word to make it sound preposterous. “You’re both fags.”

“Gay marriage was legalised a couple years ago,” Harry said, struggling to keep his voice level. The bartender was hovering around them now, obviously expecting to throw someone out, but Harry wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction.

“Whatever mate,” Mark laughed cruelly, finishing off his second glass. From the look of his eyes, he had been going at the alcohol for long before Harry had arrived. He called for another pint. “It’s fine with me. Only had that little twink for experimenting, you know? T’was never serious. Knew he wouldn’t say anything. Only you and that skank he lives with know, right?”

Harry’s fists clenched by his side.

“He was always so fucking _clingy_ , you know? God, I hate bitches like that. Kissing random places when we fucked, wanting to cuddle afterwards...”

The bone in Harry’s jaw jumped uncontrollably. Mark laughed once again, his Adam’s apple jerking irritably.

“Well, you’re welcome to that dirty little bitch,” he spat, suddenly angry. “Hope you get his disease.”

And then, all he could see was red.

Red reflected in Mark’s irises. Red strobe lights flashing behind them in the bar as drunkards hung off each other’s shoulders. The red tinge on the beer that was settled on the bottom of Mark’s glass, fizzing away the last of his years. Red off the illuminated sign Harry was glaring at so vindictively, so spitefully. ‘You’ll die soon,’ he thought. ‘You’ll die soon, and nobody will even miss you.’ Six months dropped off the tally, almost going unnoticed. 

A welt appeared on the side of Mark’s cheek, deepening in colour with each passing moment, from deep red to a darkening purple. Blood seeped through his knuckles, caking around his nose, and slivered past his chapped, cut, ugly lips.

"What the fuck was that for?" Mark asked crudely, grasping onto his bloody nose. Harry didn't answer. He just stood there, looking at him.

He'd never hurt anyone before. 

He saw the red of the police lights. The red of the fire alarm in the cell. The red on Louis’ cheeks when he picked him up from the station with a wad of money in his hand for bail. The red of his car. The red of their hall and the red of the bed-sheets as Louis settled him in. The red of his knuckles which would ultimately stay bleeding for days, reminding him what he had done. 

Louis’ tears left red paths on his face. “When I say goodnight, Harry,” he mumbled, his deep pink lips trembling in the darkness. “I’ll be meaning goodbye.”

And there came the gut wrenching pain in his chest that always followed thoughts of Louis, but this time it wasn’t accompanied by a goofy smile and butterflies in his stomach; rather cold dread and heavy guilt settled upon his strong shoulders, making him feel weaker than he ever had before.

He was left, drowning in the blood on his hands, knowing that the six months Mark had lost were now added onto his own life.

What kind of monster was he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for getting this over 900 views! Your comments, kudos and support means so much to me, and I'm really happy that the fic is getting attention because I've worked so hard on it :) Two more chapters after this, thank you so much for your feedback and please, if you like it, leave kudos or comments! Thank you, love you guys xx


	10. Chapter 10

The next morning, Harry remembered everything.

He remembered the way his fist had connected with Mark’s face. How he had delivered the blow with vengeance in his heart and the illuminated sign flashing above the other man’s head. He recalled vividly the owner of the pub – who was already pissed off at having to work on Christmas Eve – running for the phone saying, “I’m not putting up with this shit tonight. Let the narks handle it.” The police had brought him to the station then, and instead of letting them go as they would be privy to in the circumstances they kept him in bail, just because fate wanted to screw with him a bit more. And when Louis came to get him out and drove him home, he had spoken with water filling his blue eyes and his voice hushed.

“You punched my ex-boyfriend in the nose, Harry,” Louis muttered, turning the corner to their apartment. He had in his right mind to point out that Louis didn’t know what Mark had said, but he kept his mouth tightly clamped. If he said that, after all, Louis would _want_ to know, and Harry wasn’t going to repeat a word of what Mark had spat at him in the bar.

“I saw him getting into the ambulance, you know,” Louis continued. A frown rested in between his eyebrows. “You broke it, you absolute asshole.”

“He just looks more like a pig now then,” Harry murmured, looking up at Louis to see if he would laugh. There was no fear; for only the second time in the four years he’d known him, Louis Tomlinson was completely serious. “Seriously, Louis, I don’t know what the big deal is...”

“The big deal is that you shouldn’t have done it for me!” Louis spluttered, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “I shouldn’t be the reason you go put yourself in jail, Harry.”

“It wasn’t just for you,” Harry said, and he was telling the truth. It had been partly for Louis, yes, but it had also been for Zayn and himself. “Mark’s a jackass.”

“That doesn’t mean you go and hit him,” Louis said, and that was the end of that. “You don’t see me breaking his goddamn nose.” They didn’t speak again until Louis was sitting with Harry on their bed, his head in his hands, looking thoroughly exhausted.

“I can’t handle this anymore,” he said. Harry scrunched his eyebrows together in confusion.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. “I thought you were happy here...”

“It’s just... I loved Mark for a long time, you know? And even though I’m with you now, it still feels weird to see him get hurt, especially by you.” Louis sighed exasperatedly; as if he was the one being dumped unceremoniously (Harry had been broken up with enough times to know the way this was headed). “Everything’s just gone so quickly between us, you know? Like we only met each other four years ago and we’re already thinking of handing out wedding invitations. It’s weird.”

“But if you love someone,” Harry protested weakly. “Why should you wait?” Louis didn’t respond. “You do love me Louis, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Louis said, but in the heat of the moment, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Harry wondered briefly if he was telling the truth. “I just think we need a break.”

“Louis...”

“When I say goodnight, Harry,” he mumbled, tears leaving streaks on his porcelain skin, “I’ll be meaning goodbye.”

He hadn’t believed him at the start. For a minute, Harry stopped to consider whether it was all some messed up dream. He spent the night tossing and turning, rubbing his eyes and pinching his arm in a desperate attempt to wake himself up, but when the light of day streamed in through his window he realised that it was his real life he’d royally messed up, all because he was too far gone for Louis to care about the consequences (he’d never believed Louis would _leave_. Him being angry with Harry was okay, because he was still his. He wasn’t anymore).

Harry rolled over on the bed and grabbed a notepad from the bedside cabinet. An almost finished black biro went along with it. Harry clutched it in his hand, thanking the stars that today was his day off from work, and started to write.

_‘Lose six months when I save someone’_ he wrote, thinking that somehow it would make more sense when he wrote it down. _‘Lose six years when I tell someone. Gain six months when I’m angry with someone???’_

He thought back more intently to the previous night. He’d been angry with people before, of course he had. He’d screamed at his mother for not allowing him to go to a house party, he’d yelled at Zayn for leaving the fridge open and spoiling all their food, he’d shouted at Niall for lying to him in tenth year. But he’d never watched as the time dropped off their lives and added itself to Harry’s own. Perhaps that was because he’d never been so intently staring at the sign before as they argued, because they meant too much to him to think of their deaths.

Maybe that was why he’d gained the six months Mark lost, because he’d somehow (in the twisted recesses of his mind he preferred not to visit) wanted him to. Hadn’t he thought, over and over again, about the fact that Mark would die in time, that he knew exactly when he would, that he held the power to save him or condemn him?

All that he could think of was the words _‘six, six, six’_ that stood out against the white of the page. Eleanor had said only God could know when people would die, but why then was the devil’s number associating itself with his gift?

Harry wasn’t a bad person. He wasn’t, despite what evidence there was to point towards it. He scribbled out over the words, determined to erase them from his mind, and focused back on Louis.

Louis. Louis. Louis.

It was natural to think of him, habit even. It was comforting like a warm hug or the taper of his neck. It was no big thing, and he meant it this time. Louis was just there, unwavering and unassuming, completely captivating in his self confidence. And Harry loved him.

He would die today.

Harry realised this with widened eyes. He remembered, after the last time he had saved the boy, looking at the sign to prepare for the next. Louis Tomlinson, 22 years old, would die in a train accident on the London Underground. Today’s date followed.

Fuck.

He couldn’t remember the time.

Then began the furious pursuit of his iPhone which kept slipping underneath the covers of the bed as he scrambled after it. It must’ve continued eluding him for at least five minutes before he caught it in sweaty hands and punched in Louis’ number, the one phone number he knew by heart, the one he had typed in just the previous night in a holding cell, knowing that he’d be the first one he’d call...

“Harry, do me a favour, okay. F...”

Harry didn’t let him finish. He knew he wouldn’t be welcomed with the usual ‘hey, baby’ or Louis’ careful tone, but he really didn’t have time for his sarcasm. A wave of relief washed over him at the sound of his voice. He was alive (for now).

“Lou, shut up a minute,” Harry said sharply. “And don’t hang up.”

“How did you know I was going to...”

“I know you, Lou,” he said desperately, thinking that every moment they wasted on unnecessary words was another second he could spend with him in his arms. “I know everything about you. I know what songs you sing in the shower and what cereals you love for breakfast and what clothes you wear and what colour your eyes are. I know you never want to know how much you weigh and you have to squeeze into your jeans. But I also know that you’re perfect for me, and I’m perfect for you, and basically, what I’m trying to say is...”

“I’m leaving, Harry,” Louis cut in defiantly. “No matter how much you twist things, you fucked up. You really, really fucked up.”

“Just for once in your life _listen_ ,” Harry pleaded, ignoring Louis’ sound of annoyance. “Do NOT get on that train.”

“You can’t tell me what I can or can’t do, Harry. Not now, not ever.”

“No, I never said you can’t get on the train. I said that you _won’t_.”

“What makes you so sure? Listen, Harry, I need to go. I don’t want to miss it.”

“LOUIS.”

He had perhaps never spoken so loudly in his life, but this was important. The phone rustled around for a minute before Louis’ voice returned.

“Don’t talk to me that way,” he said thickly.

“I’m sorry,” Harry apologised, although he wasn’t, not really. It meant that, for a fleeting minute, Louis was still within his grasp. “Just please, please don’t get on the train.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Because I love you? Sometimes love isn’t enough, Harry.”

“For fuck’s sake Louis, the train is going to crash!”

Static leaked through the line, and for a brief time Harry thought the bastard had hung up on him. It would be just like Louis to be killed by his own stubbornness.

“How the hell would you know that?” Louis asked, sounding decidedly intrigued.

Think fast, Harry, he thought. “You always say I’m intuitive, right?” He knew Louis was nodding without seeing him. “You always say that I should go with my gut. Well now I am, and I have a bad feeling about the train, and if you get on it I might never see you again, and I don’t think I could cope with that.”

Silence.

“You really think the train is going to crash?” Louis asked weakly, probably knowing that he had lost. Harry’s shoulders slumped in relief. He felt his entire body collapse into a singularity of overwhelming happiness.

“I know the train is going to crash.”

“You know, if I don’t get onto this thing and you come and pick me up, I’m going to need a better explanation than ‘I had a feeling’.”

“I’ll be sure to think of one.”

...

“I’m at King’s Cross, then.”

“That far away?”

“Just come and pick me up, Harold.”

“Fine. Just leave the station and stand on the street, just in case.”

It would be their luck to have a train fly off the tracks and hit the terminal. Louis paused, considering, and then agreed.

“I’m still pissed off with you, though,” Louis said.

_I’d rather you be annoyed than dead._

*

Louis didn’t speak to him all that day or all that night, and he slept on the sofa. They didn’t have their usual laughing fit over Louis’ lack of cooking abilities and whilst Harry made pancakes, Louis didn’t even humour him with eating them. It was awkward, but he was alive, and his sign said that he now had sixty years left.

Harry had succeeded. The world would have Louis Tomlinson for as long as he graced them to stay.

Silence filled their minds until they watched the news together. It was one of Louis’ favourite reporters, a blonde with a smooth voice, and she was talking very solemnly in front of a London train station.

“After an investigation in early 2014 over a train collision in London’s Underground railway service concluded, many were convinced that such a thing wouldn’t happen again. However, tragically, yesterday afternoon one of the tunnels that led out of the city collapsed, killing two hundred and sixty three people. This is considered the largest tragedy the Tube has ever seen, and police officers believe the bricks had been loose for quite some time before the incident. There are now thorough checks being undertaken of all routes in and out of the capital to ensure that such an event will not be repeated.”

The TV was muted and Louis turned to look at Harry as the victim’s pictures were flashed up on the screen. “How the fuck did you know that would happen?” he asked lowly, looking decidedly terrified. “Are you psychic or some shit?”

“No,” Harry said. “I’m not psychic. At least, I don’t think so.”

“Harry,” Louis said, turning to him, clutching a cushion against his chest. “Please tell me the truth. How the fuck did you know that would happen?”

Could Louis handle the truth? He was the most trustworthy person Harry knew, and he was already aware of everything else about Harry anyways. And he had to tell him sometime, right?

Why could he tell a couple months old baby that he hadn’t even gotten the chance to love yet his deepest, darkest secret but yet keep it from the boy he was so desperate to keep beside him? (Perhaps that was why. He was afraid he’d leave again.)

“I will,” Harry said finally. “If you answer me a question first.”

Louis opened his mouth to protest before thinking better of it. “Fine,” he said. “Hit me with it.”

“Are we back together?”

“Why does that matter?” Louis questioned. “You should tell me the truth regardless.”

“I know,” Harry admitted. “But are we?”

“I suppose,” Louis said. “We were never really broken up, anyways, were we? Just on a break. I was kind of pissed off last night. I just wanted to take a time out and go back home for a while, to my mum and sisters, you know?”

“It sounded a lot like a break-up to me,” Harry said. “I just want to make sure that what I’m about to tell you won’t make you leave me.”

“Unless you’ve killed someone, I’m pretty sure we can overlook whatever it is,” Louis said, smiling slightly. Harry grinned back at him, thankful that the light-hearted boy he was in love with had returned.

“Okay, right, I haven’t told anyone about this... Well, I have, sort of, but it’s not something I tell everyone, you know?”

“Is this some kind of secret weird kink?” Louis asked, smirking. “Because if it is I’m very interested.”

Harry felt his cheeks redden slightly. It was stupid how nervous Louis made him. “No. It’s more about what I see in the mirror.”

“Everybody sees things in the mirror they don’t like,” Louis laughed, not meanly. Harry thought that this was his out; he could grin along with Louis and make up some fake insecurity that they would work against together, just like how Harry kissed along the slight chub on Louis’ waist and made him love what was underneath his skin. But that wouldn’t have been honest, and he didn’t like to lie to Louis.

“I know when people are going to die.”

There it was, out in the bright light of the London morning, impossible to take back. He’d spoken so slowly, so clearly, and Louis was hanging off each of his words as he always did, so he couldn’t even have pretended to have said something else.

Louis looked at him for a moment. His smile twisted into a sort of frown. “If this is some sort of joke, I’m not finding it funny,” he said.

“I wish it was a joke,” Harry said, sighing. “But it’s true. I can tell exactly when and how people will die.”

He put his fingers against his temples, closing his blue eyes. “Okay, say for two minutes that you weren’t messing with me, how could you possibly know that? Is there a book? Like a Yellow Pages? The Death Directory?”

This would’ve been funny, Harry thought, if he wasn’t the one saying it.

“No, nothing like that,” Harry said, trying to keep his voice level. “The first time I see someone, there’s like a sign above their head...”

“A sign,” Louis repeated, disbelieving.

“An illuminated sign,” Harry repeated, slightly frustrated. “Like Vegas. And it counts down the years and days and months until they die, and then it says how they will beside it.”

“You seriously expect me to believe that you walk around seeing illuminated signs with peoples’ deaths written on it?”

“Yeah, I do, because that’s what you do when you love someone. You believe them.”

Louis opened his mouth, and then closed it again, and pursed his lips, obviously struggling. “So you’re like a super-hero? Is that it?”

“No, not really,” Harry said, shaking his head, not really understanding how Louis could reach that conclusion.

“But if you know when someone was going to die... You’d be able to save them, right?”

“I lose six months for every person I save,” Harry said. “And six years when I tell someone.”

“You’re fucking joking me,” Louis snapped, moving further away once more so that he was on the other end of the sofa (he’d been edging closer during the conversation, the gravity between them still there despite the irritation). “You mean you’ve lost six years of your life by telling me this? Why would you even bother?”

“Because I didn’t think you’d stay if I didn’t.”

“That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” Louis snapped. “In fact, all of this is. You can’t just spring this on me Harry, not now...”

“When exactly should I have told you?” Harry questioned, his voice slightly edgy. “The first day we met? Would’ve scared you away right then, we wouldn’t even have fallen in love. Is that what you want?”

“No, of course not...”

“I kept it from my best friends, my own goddamn mother and father, I’ve never told anyone else face to face like this, and you’re seriously going to attack me for doing so?”

“It’s just a lot to take in, Harry,” Louis said. “Calm your tits, for God’s sake.”

Harry looked at him for a moment, staring deep into his eyes. The sad thing was that when they maintained eye contact Harry couldn’t stay angry at the same time. He groaned and flopped back against the sofa, lying there with his eyes closed and his mouth shut for what must’ve been five minutes.

“So you know when everyone will die,” Louis said. “That must be terrible.”

“It is,” Harry said. Despite never thinking about it that way before, the words came pouring out like an avalanche, as if they had been hidden for years. “Because every single attractive person I’ve wanted to get to know or have a crush on I have to have their death staring me right in the face. And you want to tell them not to go to a specific place on a specific day, but then they’d question you and how you knew that, and then I’d end up carted away to some freak show when it came true, you know? And I have to look at my own mother and think, ‘I could warn you to get checked for breast cancer, but I can’t, because I love life and I’m selfish’.”

“I don’t think you’re selfish,” Louis said. “Just because you love yourself, love life, doesn’t mean you’re selfish for wanting to keep going. I think it’s brave. Think of all the people who’ve given up on life.”

“Mr Donaldson is one of them,” Harry said. “He’ll die in his early fifties. Gunshot to the mouth. By the way, his wife is cheating. You were right.”

“Your university lecturer?” Louis exclaimed, his eyebrows raised. “Huh. He seems like a nice enough guy.”

“You don’t need to be a shitty person to want to kill yourself,” Harry said. “It’s the good people who want to leave this god-awful world. That’s what makes them good people.”

“I’m not sure I believe that.”

Silence.

“Do you know when I’m going to die?”

Harry turned to look at Louis, who was looking significantly more tired than he had that morning when he picked him up from the train station. “Yes,” he said. “But do you really want me to tell you?”

“No,” Louis answered almost immediately. “No, I don’t. But all those times – on the Eiffel Tower, the ice rink, the train – you’ve saved my life, haven’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“What makes me so different from your mum then? The little girl down the street? Niall? Zayn? Eleanor?”

This time, he didn’t have to think.

“Because you’re you, Lou, and you deserve to live.”

*

The white sand cascaded across the land, blowing in thin wisps into the sea. Harry thought that the sea and sand were the epitome of a tragic love story, perhaps even on the same level as Romeo and Juliet; the sea took little bits of the sand each and every day, and just when the beach rebuilt itself the water tore it apart. Yet, it stayed exactly where it was, just because it knew the ocean would return. The small breeze created a slight chill, but then again there were already goosebumps on Harry’s arms, and the hair on the back of his neck was standing as stiffly as he was in his suit.

A warm, orange glow covered the beach as the sun dipped slowly behind the horizon. The sound of water crashing against the cliff faces not far away echoed through his head, mingling with the yells of the seagulls as they cheered. Nature was in tune with the event, helping it along, and as the rising stars appeared Harry shuffled on his feet, waiting patiently as Zayn coughed beside him.

It was simple, uneventful, much like _HarryandLouis_. Relaxing, carefree yet not careless, filled with only those whom they adored. The guests milled around, searching for their seats, their crisp, white outfits clean and elegant. Those that looked like Louis sat on one side and the Styles the other. Theo walked up with the rings on a blue satin pillow, grinning up at his Uncle Harry.

Harry and Louis had been close before. After all, they had been attached at the hip for the past six years. But Harry had never felt more intimate with him than as he watched Louis walk around the guests, stopping to grin at his mother and hug Harry’s sister Gemma, who was pregnant once again. He was beautiful, majestic, looking just as good in a suit as he had the first day they had met. Little stray hairs settled themselves against his forehead, even them wanting to cling to his skin, and he was grinning so widely that it must’ve been hurting his cheeks. Harry was much the same.

Soft music played in the background, chosen specifically by Liam and Zayn, who were holding hands in the first row (Sophia had been broken up with a year ago). Niall had suggested an acoustic guitar player, but after he failed to show up DJ Payne and Malik stepped up with a cheap boom-box from the late nineties. Anne had a single tear dripping down her face, Robin holding a hankie in his hand and dabbing at his wife’s cheek with gentle precision. Jay was sitting with her daughters, all dressed in pale baby blue and white dresses, holding a bouquet of flowers Harry couldn’t remember the name of.

A burst of joy exploded in Harry’s chest as Louis moved to stand in front of him, looking like an angel in disguise. There was a white fleck of sand on his shoulder, and Harry wiped it off with delicacy lacing his fingertips, smiling softly as he went. “Can’t have my husband looking shabby,” Harry murmured into his ear, his lips tickling Louis’ skin. Louis grinned.

“I apologise,” Louis teased. “Not all of us can look like they just walked out of a photo-shoot.”

“Not everyone,” Harry whispered. “But you definitely do. You look amazing.”

They weren’t wearing shoes, and so the warm, smooth sand moved around their feet and in between their toes, like a liquid. The officiator was standing, his clothes being whipped around by the increasing wind, and started reciting the words Harry had heard at a thousand weddings before but only truly listened to now.

Fresh air leaked in through his mouth and filled his lungs until he was fit to bursting. London always had heavy, thick air; here, it was as if breathing was a hobby, something to make you happy rather than a necessity. The entire experience was serene, not a doubt in Harry’s mind that he was making the right decision.

The whole thing about weddings was that everything had to be perfect. Theirs wasn’t, by normal terms; the women had to abandon their high heels at the beginning of the beach and Harry’s hair was frizzing outwards with the spray of the sea; but it was bliss, paradise, and not just because it was on sand in Cancun, but because it was Louis standing in front of him. They could’ve gotten married in their bathroom and he would still be just as happy.

“Mr Styles, would you like to recite your vows?”

Harry nodded and fumbled around in his pocket for the piece of paper on which he had scribbled down a multitude of thoughts and feelings over the past couple of years in which they’d been planning the ceremony. He still hadn’t put it all together, but he decided that it was best to wing it. After all, their relationship hadn’t been scripted, and look how perfect that was.

“I have always believed in soulmates and fairytales,” Harry began, knowing that by the end he would be crying like his mother. “But I never knew that it could happen to me. I watched as my friends went off with those they loved and my mother got married to the man of her dreams, and I couldn’t help but wonder why my person hadn’t arrived yet on a white horse and shining armour.”

Louis was smiling at him, his hair being blown in the wind, his eyes the colour of the Caribbean sea and sky. He was looking at him as he always had; like Harry was the galaxies around the earth, like he built the greatest wonders of the world, personally crafted the Great Wall of China. And he felt beautiful standing there, looking at no one but the boy who he knew better than himself, better than anyone.

“But then I met you, and I knew from the first time I saw you there was something different about you. You felt like a home I hadn’t had the chance to live in yet. You made me feel as if I could be a human again, that I was nothing other than extraordinary. I’ve been a better me since I met you, a better person since I loved you, and I know that with every passing day and every lingering kiss I will fall deeper into you. I was stupid to think that I could’ve resisted it, stupid to mess with fate thinking that I could intervene. I love you, Louis, and I am so, so proud to be your husband, if you’ll have me.”

The officiator nodded, mumbled a ‘beautiful’ and then turned to Louis, who looked damn near tears himself. “And you, Mr Tomlinson,” he said. “Would you recite your vows?”  
Louis was already holding a piece of printed paper in his slightly sweaty hand (for once Louis was the prepared one. Harry was amazed). He muttered, “How am I supposed to beat that?” under his breath, which resulted in a wave of laughter sweeping through the crowd of on-lookers. Harry chuckled as well and grinned at Louis, his dimples threatening to puncture his skin. He was so deliriously happy and he hadn’t even begun drinking yet.

“Harry Edward Styles,” Louis began, grinning. “Every fibre of my being is in love with you. You’ve saved me time and time again, in every meaning of the word. You’re the Jack to my Rose, the Jude Law to my Cameron Diaz in The Holiday. When I first met you, I never imagined that I’d end up caring for you so much. I’ve never been a big believer in true love or happily ever after, but with you I think that might just be what I have waiting in front of me. You trust me with everything, you love me with all you have, you are beautiful and amazing and I always wonder why you chose me, over all the other people you have in love with you and don’t even realise.

Harry smiled at him. His throat was closing over with the fear of tears, and he couldn’t help but think he didn’t care if everyone else hated him as long as he had Louis.

“I am ashamed to call this love human, and I am too afraid to call it divine in case I piss off some higher being and he decides to screw us over more than he already has. But I love you, and I want to wake up to you every morning, and I want to have kids with you and kiss you at least ten times before you go to work and I want you to be happy, I want you to be so happy, Harry, you have no idea. They say the basis of a good relationship is friendship, but I’m sorry for putting you through that for so long. I know now I should’ve just proposed the first time our eyes met.”

Harry laughed, and the guests did as well.

“I love you. I love you so damn much it makes me embarrassed to think of, because we shouldn’t be so dependent on someone else, right? But I am. Dependent on you, that is. I need you in my life to keep me strong, because you are the source of my strength, Harry. I swear to God I’ll never let you go, and I’ll be there beside you for the rest of my life, no matter how many illuminated signs point me in the opposite direction. I take you for my husband, today and forever.”

Sniffles filled the beach. Everything else was muted as Harry looked at Louis and heard the words, “I now pronounce you Mr and Mr Tomlinson-Styles. You may kiss your groom.”

Harry put his hands on the side of Louis’ cheeks and pulled him gently to him, bending over so that their lips could touch. It was fireworks and it was thunderstorms, and it was coffee and tea brewing on their stove back at home in London. It was the children running around Hamley’s and the buses that rounded the streets of the city. It was congestion and it was fresh air, it was everything and nothing all combined into one perfect moment, one kiss that lasted forever and a day, only the lack of oxygen pulling them apart.

And he looked at his husband (yes, he could finally call him that now) and the redness of his lips, and he thought about how it didn’t matter that he only had twenty years left and Louis had sixty, because he would going to make these decades the best Louis had ever experienced.

Just as long as he didn’t let him go, they could be so happy together; married, strong and happily.

He kissed him once more, just because he could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it took so much for me not to tell you guys what was going to happen! I tried really hard to get this out sooner to make up for the confusion last time (oops. Sorry again) and I hope you like the direction I'm going. The last chapter will unfortunately be the last, and it might take a little bit longer to get out. Thank you so so much for all of your comments and kudos, it means so damn much!


	11. Chapter 11

“Niall, nice to hear from you! It’s been a while.”

“‘It’s been a while’,” Niall mocked. Harry could feel him grinning through the phone. “What a cliché way to answer the phone to your best friend.”

“Who said you were my best friend?” Harry teased.

“You are a thirty eight year old man and you’re still using that line?”

Harry laughed, switching the phone to his other ear so that he could pick up a pair of wellington boots Melanie had left in the hallway, soaking and muddy. At least Savannah had manners; her’s were sitting at the backdoor, crudely cleaned with a square of kitchen roll she’d left lying on the floor. Typical.

“Not everything changes,” Harry pointed out, smiling. It was a nice sentiment, but many things had in fact differed from the last time he had talked to Niall. For example:

He had shorter hair. He wore better suits. He had an expensive three bedroom house in the beautiful English countryside overlooking a field of corn. He hadn’t been to Ireland for ten years. He had a new job as a successful London lawyer. He’d been married sixteen years to the most amazing man he had ever met. He had two teenage girls running around, screaming about boyfriends and hairdryers and French braids. And he had a cat named Mittens.

“Me and Nancy are going down to Cork for the weekend. We were wondering if you wanted to come along with the kids so we could catch up?”

“I don’t know, Ni,” Harry admitted, drifting past Louis who was sitting reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. Their fingers interlocked briefly before they split once again, Harry going to put the kettle on – a job made more difficult with the use of only one hand. “Lou and I were thinking of heading to the beach house for a while. Savannah’s having some... romantic problems at the moment. We thought it might be good to get away for a week or so.”

“Well, I don’t know about you Harry, but I think _my_ teenage son is very attractive.”

Harry laughed and Louis, who could just about hear Niall’s voice through the phone (it carried very well, just as it had in uni) chuckled along with him.

“You make a good point,” Harry admitted, grinning. “Operation Set Up Our Kids is a go, then?”

“Nancy will be happy. She’s always complaining Teddy picks ‘the wrong type’ of girls. Didn’t know there was one, to be honest.”

“Does Nancy know you banged the majority of our graduating class? It only makes sense that Ted would follow in his father’s footsteps.”

Niall laughed, but Harry noticed that he didn’t answer. “So we’ll pick you up on Friday at about nine, is that okay?”

“Are you in England?” Harry asked, scrunching his eyebrows together in concentration. Louis chuckled in the background and came to help him in his attempt to pour tea with one hand on the kettle. Mittens was slinking around the kitchen, snaking in through their legs, rubbing herself up against their calves fondly.

“Yeah, Nancy’s from up here, remember?” Niall said. “We’re visiting her parents. Delightful people, really...”

“Did you hear about Liam and Sophia?” Harry asked. Eleanor – who had stayed over the previous night, she was going through a particularly sticky divorce – trailed herself into the kitchen, her hair sticking up in random places. She picked the cat up off the floor and started stroking her whilst Louis made another cuppa. “Apparently they’re getting married?”  
“I don’t agree with it,” Niall said in a hushed tone, as if Liam could hear him, even though he was miles away from the both of them. He got a recording contract at twenty five and was now a famed artist on tour around North America. Harry hadn’t talked to him in five years before he got the invoice about the wedding at his office. “He’s never been quite right since Zayn died, you know? I think he’s just with Sophia because there’s no one else.”

Harry remembered his and Louis’ wedding, when he finally realised what Zayn was trying to ask him about nearly twenty years ago in their kitchen. Zayn’s fingers never once unhooked themselves from the waistband of Liam’s trousers. They’d slow danced together, covered in confetti, when they thought everybody else had gone from the party. They’d snuck out of the hotel that night to watch the stars from the vantage point of the Mexican beach, only seen because Harry looked out of his window at the exact moment they kissed. And then they’d dated, for quite a while, and Liam had stayed with him every moment in the hospital. The thing with emphysema was that you thought you were getting better – you thought you had a chance – and then it came in tsunami waves, pulling you under.

Each and every time he thought of Zayn, a heavy weight settled in Harry’s heart, equal parts grief and guilt. Louis comforted him with the fact that he had _tried_ to stop Zayn smoking through a series of passive aggressive comments, but it didn’t work. All Harry could think was that he should’ve done something more, should’ve burnt Zayn’s cigarettes when he was at work or bought him nicotine patches or _something_. Harry prided himself on not having many regrets, but not telling Zayn of his ‘gift’ was his biggest.

“I think you might be right, Niall,” Harry said slowly, sipping on the tea that Louis passed into his slightly shaky hands. “Are you still going though?”

“Of course I am,” he said. “Liam might be a twat, but I’m not going to miss his wedding. I have to go now, mate. Nancy’s having a bit of a clothing crisis. We’re going out for dinner tonight and her dress just popped open.”

“Have you considered the fact she might be pregnant again?” Harry asked, only half teasing. Niall laughed, but he sounded panicky. Niall and Nancy Horan already had three children; Ted, Danielle and Fredrick.

“I asked her that too, but she said it was just the doughnuts. Tasty little buggers, they are.” (Niall’s wife owned a bakery; a bad career choice for someone who struggles with their weight.)

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. We’ll see you on Friday.”

“See you then, mate!” Niall called cheerily. Harry could picture his smile in his mind, as bright and vivid as it had been twenty years ago, calming him from the inside out.

The phone hung up with a click. Harry put it face down on the counter. “Liam and Sophia are getting married,” Harry provided Louis, who was folding up the newspaper. He wasn’t sure why he kept reading it every morning. It always made him feel depressed. (“Better to be depressed and educated than happy and ignorant,” Louis always said. Harry, who knew more than the average person about everyone he met, tended to disagree.)

“I heard,” Louis said, smiling fondly. “Niall’s voice carries.”

Louis looked much how he had twenty years ago, bar a couple of wrinkles on his forehead and shorter hair. For some reason, once you reached forty, you had to be respectably dressed at all times, and so Louis wore suits the majority of the time. Harry wasn’t complaining.

“What do you think of it?” Harry asked, finishing off his tea, feeling it heat him from the inside out. There was no point asking Eleanor; she hadn’t spoken freely about anything but her ex-husband and his various other girlfriends in over three weeks.

Louis shrugged his shoulders and let out a long, drawn exhale.

“I just don’t know, Harry,” he admitted. It was very unlike Louis to admit defeat, but this time, Harry found himself understanding. “I mean, he obviously loved Zayn. He loved him so damn much, you could tell. Still can, when you talk about him. But Zayn’s gone now. He has to move on. No amount of punishing himself will bring him back.”

“I could’ve saved him,” Harry said, the tears welling in his eyes despite his efforts to prevent it. “I could’ve... told him sooner. About the smoking, you know?”

“We’ve been through this before,” Louis said, a small crease appearing in between his eyebrows. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you told him. The damage to his lungs might’ve already been done.”

“I suppose,” Harry mumbled, setting his tea down on the counter. He buried his head into Louis’ shoulder, who had welcomed him into a hug without even needing to be asked. “I just feel guilty,” he muttered, his voice muffled by the fabric of Louis’ shirt. “Like I could’ve prevented all of this.”

“Everyone makes mistakes, Harry,” Louis said, kissing him on the top of his head. He still, even at this age, had to strain to reach it. “And think of all the happiness you gave Zayn over the years. You were one of his best friends, Harry. For God’s sake, without you, Zayn and Liam would’ve never met!”

It was true that he had introduced them, however Harry wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse.

“I’m done talking about this,” Louis said, somewhat firmly. “You are a good person, Harry, and I don’t want you beating yourself up about this anymore, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Harry muttered pathetically. Louis patted his arms, looking at him with love reflected in his irises.

“Now, man up,” Louis teased. Harry laughed, wiping the tears out of his eyes, determined not to let them fall off of his face. “Melanie mentioned she wanted to talk to you.”

“What about?” Harry asked, suddenly serious. Savannah was always the one that needed to analyse every detail and needed Harry’s help to do so. In fact, just the other day they had a three hour conversation about whether she should get a pixie cut (the result had been a resounding ‘no’ from Savannah, who Harry thought had made her mind up before they even began). Melanie on the other hand had this weird thing about wanting to deal with everything herself.

Louis shrugged. “She didn’t say. But she just wanted you, she told me that much.”

He could tell that Louis wasn’t offended by this; it was one of the best things about him. He was the ‘fun’ parent, the one that they went bowling with and started water fights during summer time. Harry was the one who had to pick up the slack of a broken heart. He didn’t mind. Their respective roles meant that the family worked well together, nobody ever feeling abandoned or frustrated. It was a good life, Harry often thought.

“Okay, I’ll go up to her now,” he said, squeezing Louis’ hand. It was warm, and comforting, like a hot bath or a drink of tea on a winter’s night. “Can you put the dinner on?”

“Course I can, babe,” he mumbled, capturing Harry’s lips with his own. He tasted a mixture of coffee and strawberries. “You’ll tell me if there’s something wrong though, right?”

“Don’t we always tell each other everything?” Harry said. That had been one of their promises to each other, long before they contracted Eleanor as the surrogate of their children; to always be honest and open, even if the children asked them not to tell each other. The most important part of love was trust, after all. You couldn’t have one without the other.  
Louis nodded, and Harry left the kitchen and ran up the stairs that were almost as familiar as Louis’ touch towards Melanie’s room. He passed Savannah’s, which had loud rock music blasting through the door (he held back the urge to tell her to turn it down. Louis had suggested letting her get it out of her system, to which Harry had reluctantly agreed) and entered the pink and white bedroom of his youngest daughter. Whilst Savannah dressed in dark colours and band t-shirts, Melanie had a wide wardrobe built into the back of her room that was stuffed to the brim with lace and pastels. Harry was amazed that two sisters could be so different.

“Your dad said you wanted a chat,” Harry said, moving over to her bed. He sat down on the end of it, sinking into the pink, pressed sheets, being bombarded by a range of teddies that fell on top of him. Melanie looked up from her laptop, her green-grey eyes shining and her brown, dyed ombré hair falling in waves over her shoulder. She was beautiful (“Just as gorgeous as you, Harry,” Louis muttered the day she was born) and each time Harry’s eyes rested on her he remembered not wanting her to fall asleep as a baby because he wanted to spend every minute of every day playing with her and Savannah, who was always more awake. “Is there something wrong?”

“Why do you always think something’s wrong?” she asked, rolling her eyes, her voice the tone of an annoyed fourteen year old. “When Savannah wants to talk you never assume that.”

“That’s because Savannah’s sixteen years old,” Harry said. _‘And she discusses her lunch choices with me,’_ he added, but it was just in thought, so no one heard it but him.

“Well, I’m fine,” she said, still tapping away on the keys. She kept going for a couple of minutes before pushing it off her lap and crawling over towards her dad. She rested her head against his shoulder so that her hair fell over her eyes, hiding her face. Harry slung his arm around her shoulder and held him tightly to his side. “I just wanted to ask you something.”

“Okay,” Harry said, scrunching his nose in slight confusion. “Hit me with it, kid.”

“Are you sad, Dad?” she questioned, sniffling slightly from under her waterfall of hair. Harry considered this for a moment; he had never been happier than he was at that moment. Of course, there was the issue of his impending death, but he didn’t feel like explaining this to his daughter.

Harry had spent years before this conversation preparing himself for his death in approximately six years time. He knew that it wouldn’t be long (at least in heaven terms) before Louis joined him and they would be together in whatever came next.

He was assured by the fact that anywhere that had Louis would be an amazing place. Even the fires of Hell would be quenched by him, because he was 70% water and 100% goodness, even when he didn’t realise it. _Especially_ when he didn’t realise it. Now, as he looked upon the green-grey eyes of his youngest daughter, he realised that he hadn’t been ready at all. He’d always been dreading leaving them.

If Harry couldn’t tell when people would die, what would have happened to them? He would’ve been standing over Louis’ grave a year after their first meeting, probably, holding onto Jay (who he wouldn’t even have gotten the chance to know) as he stared at the casket of his friend. Would they even have kissed? Would Louis have died unloved by the one he called his own? Would Melanie and Savannah even have been born?

“No, Mel,” he said, hoping that she wouldn’t have noticed the brief pause in which he had considered his answer. “I’m not sad at all. I have you, and Savannah, and your dad. What else do I need?”

“I was just wondering,” Melanie said. She rose up from her position against her father’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Can I tell you something unbelievable?” she asked. Harry nodded.

“I’ll believe anything you tell me,” he said. Melanie laughed. (She sounded like Louis when she giggled; it was decidedly adorable.)

“I seriously doubt it, but I’ll try,” she said. Harry, who took it that she was teasing, smiled. Melanie, however, looked as if she was about to pass out from anxiety.

“I can tell when people are going to die, Dad.”

He couldn’t even make it sound like a question. “What.”

Melanie let out a loud sigh and flopped back against the bed, narrowly missing hitting her head against the wall. Harry sat there, studying his youngest daughter, feeling distinctly as if his entire world had collapsed into a singularity. Had he condemned his own daughter to an untimely demise?

He flashed up her sign. Her telling him this should’ve erased six years, but it hadn’t – she would still die at ninety-five years old from a heart attack. It hadn’t changed from the first time Harry saw her in the hospital and held her in his arms. She hadn’t reached from the tips of his fingers to the crease in his arm, then.

“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” Melanie said. “Savannah didn’t either.”

“You told Savannah as well?” Harry questioned. That should’ve been twelve years gone, however her tally remained untouched. Had she heard Harry and Louis talking about his ‘talent’ without thinking and confused it in her angst-ridden mind?

“She thought something was wrong with me,” Melanie explained. “So I told her. You probably think I’m crazy.”

“No, I don’t,” Harry said. He wringed his hands and placed them on his temples. His head was throbbing. He hadn’t expected that this would happen. He only had about six years left, and if he told Melanie, he’d be gone within days.

“Dad,” Melanie said, tears brimming in the corners of her eyes. “It scares me. I can see, like, signs above peoples’ heads. They tell me how they’re going to die.”

“I know, Mel,” Harry said. A weight settled on his chest, pushing all the oxygen out as he watched his daughter break down before him. It hurt, physically and emotionally, as if his heart was being forcibly pulled out of his body. Like Louis kissing Mark had made him feel, now that he thought about it.

“No, you don’t!” Melanie exclaimed, properly crying now. Her face was red with frustration.

“Yes, I do, because I have the same thing!” Harry shouted back. Melanie sat up to attention, either because she was shocked by his words or by the raise of his voice – he had never spoken in such an elevated tone to her before, not since she pushed Savannah into the river when she was six. He sighed, his pulse rate decreasing as he did so.

“I probably should’ve told you and Savannah long ago,” Harry began. “But I was scared because I thought I’d lose time if I did. I have the same thing as you, Mel,” he said, sighing. Melanie was staring at him with wide, surprised eyes. “I never thought you’d inherit it.”

“You’re going to die, soon, Dad. Of _self inflicted_ injures,” Melanie said. She was sobbing now, and so was Harry. He imagined that if Louis heard them he’d phone an ambulance or something. Thankfully, nobody could hear their cries over Savannah’s Black Veil Brides/Linkin Park/Whatever she was listening to that day.

“I know, baby,” he said. “I told you, I lose time when I try to help people or tell them.”

“But why?” Melanie questioned. “I’ve saved people my whole life and I’ve never lost a day!”

“You’ve always known about this?” Harry asked, wondering how he could’ve missed all of this. “Why didn’t you tell me, Mel?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “No one ever told me not to, I just assumed. You’ve seen Dad’s super-hero movies. I wasn’t going to be experimented on.”

Where had he heard that thought process before? (For a brief, darkened moment, Harry wished Melanie wasn’t so much like him.)

“You should’ve told me,” Harry finished, rather lamely. Melanie nodded, pursing her lips.

“I know,” she said, slightly hesitantly. “But – and don’t be mad - there’s something else, as well.”

Harry found himself craving vodka. He wondered if there was any behind the fridge (there was a neat little hole behind it in their house. Louis had discovered it on the first day and claimed it as his own alcohol cupboard). He really needed to be drunk at that moment.

“I’m not sure if you can do it too, but when I concentrate really hard... When someone asks me to – I tried it with Savannah – I can make people live longer.”

All thoughts of spirits whizzed out of Harry’s mind as he scrutinised the young girl. “Well,” he began, blinking slowly. The world started spinning just a little bit less quickly. “I’ve certainly never been able to do that.” (Understatement of the century, he thought sarcastically.)

“But it’s a good thing, right?” Melanie said, her eyebrows scrunching together in a way that was definitely learnt from Louis. “I mean, we were talking in school today about God and all... It couldn’t be the devil if it helps, right?”

“Definitely,” Harry said, sounding surer of himself than perhaps ever before. He watched as Melanie visibly relaxed. “You’re an amazing little girl, Mel, you know that?”

“I know that,” she said, standing up and bringing her father into a tight hug. “I’ve learnt from the best.”

“A charmer, just like your dad,” Harry muttered against his daughter’s silky brown hair. She grinned against his chest – she was already up to his chin, where did the time go – and then looked at her dad, who had begun speaking once more.

“Why were you worrying before?” Harry asked, still slightly confused. “If you knew you could give me more time...”

“I was worried you wouldn’t want it,” Melanie said, her voice slightly muffled by the fabric of Harry’s white shirt, just like Harry’s had been mere moments ago with Louis. “That you’d leave me.”

“Don’t be so silly,” Harry chastised softly. “You, Savannah and your dad are the most important people in the world to me. Who better to live for, eh?”

“Will you let me help you then, Dad?” she asked, her eyelashes long and sticking slightly with mascara and tears. “Will you ask for it?”

Harry smiled at her and kissed the top of her head, enjoying the feel of his daughter in his arms, knowing that he was holding everything that mattered. “Of course I will, baby,” he said. She whimpered softly against his tie, but he didn’t care that she was getting makeup over his uniform.

He remembered holding her hand as she jumped through the flowers. He remembered crying at night as Louis snored softly beside him, dreading the day that he would have to leave it all behind. He recalled considering why all true loves had to be star-crossed, and despising the fact that he and Louis were a part of that.

Neuroscience research had revealed that a brain in love (never a person; scientists work with parts of the human body without considering how they rely on each other) operates at an elevated level of intensity. The same hormones are produced in the human body when they have fallen in love – or are still infatuated after years of marriage, for example – as a person obsessed or addicted to a particular substance.

Harry believed that this was the most accurate way of describing how he felt for Louis – he was a blue-eyed wonder drug, more invigorating than anything man could make. However, this feeling can cause people who would otherwise never think of doing such things such as changing their jobs, lifestyles, _die_ for each other. Or even live, because sometimes living was harder than dying. Harry had always believed it was easier, but he knew he wouldn’t have a chance to prove that.

Now, with the talent he had passed onto his youngest daughter, he would be able to spend time with Louis; he would be able to play with their grandchildren together and sit out on the porch talking about sports and he’d be able to kiss him each and every day for the next sixty years or longer. It would be idyllic; it would be perfection; it would be a real, honest happily ever after.

And God, was Harry happy to be a cliché.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, over a thousand views! This is the most kudos and comments that I've ever gotten on a fic, and I am so so so happy that everyone has responded so well. Thank you to all of the people who have followed the story and provided their input on it. It's for you that I decided to end it on a happy note! :) Keep on with the kudos and comments, and I hope you like the way it ended up :)  
> As for my future writing projects, I am working on a oneshot at the moment that you can find the summary for on my account. It should be up in a couple of weeks at most! :D Thank you so much yet again, without you guys I would've never been motivated enough to finish, so thanks.  
> Love you all!  
> \- Lauren


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